CHM February 2023
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2023-01-11 05:00:00+00:00

Copyright © 2023 by CHM LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Art: Pietro Rotelli

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

The close of another submission period has created a lot of excitement for what is to come for CHM. It has been and continues to be a delight to put this magazine together for the best readership in the world. If you are a writer and have submitted a story to us recently or at any time, we can’t thank you enough. We’d be nothing without all the writers literally answering the call. And because of you, we have been able to piece together a splendid and terrifying issue this month.

We’ll start with a thrilling weird tale from CHM alum Megan M. Davies-Ostrom in “O.A.G.F” and we’ll stay in familiar territory with an existential nightmare from Patrick Barb in “The Other David.” We are very pleased to offer “No One Warns You,” a brand new story from the Bram Stoker award nominated writer S.P. Miskowski that poignantly finds cosmic horror in everyday life.

For a brief intermission, we hope you enjoy an ethereal prose poem from Maxwell I. Gold in “Ex Oblivione: Nothing Out of the End.” A beautiful tale of gluttony and cosmic horror follows in “The Weeds and the Black Spot.” We’ll bear witness to a vision of the crumbling of human society at the hands of a new technology in “Phase Ball,” then be treated to a period piece blending the horrors of war and that sweet taste of cosmic helplessness in “Marienne.” And at last, ignorance is bliss and existence is pain in “Colder than the Heart Devoid of Love.”

Enjoy.

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age upon first reading the story: Dagon by HPL.

Resides in the flatland that is Oklahoma City.

Carson Winter: Co-Editor |Social Media Manager

Horror fan and author with works featured in Vastarien and the No Sleep podcast. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Featured artists this month

Cover art: Pietro Rotelli works as a freelance graphic designer, as a comic book writer and illustrator for Panini (as well as cover artist for CHM, Lovecraftian Studies, Delos Digital, Watson Edizioni and others). My hobby is stop motion and 2D animation with 3D contamination.

Maxwell Marais is an illustrator and author of all things horror currently living in Montreal, Canada. Their work is often featured in the pages of CHM, and their stories can be found in such publications as Thuggish Itch and The NoSleep podcast. Find their art at www.instagram.com/insanity_inc/

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

A monthly tome of terrifying tales, lovecraftian, cosmic, and weird.

O.A.G.F.

By Megan M. Davies-Ostrom

My family hated my brother’s girlfriend, Mia. Mom called her a cheap, godless heathen. Dad called her aggressive and uppity. Uncle Phil joked that Darrell ‘always did go for crazy’. Mia was none of those things. Or maybe she was all of them and just didn’t care. She was strong. She was present, confident, and unapologetic. She refused to be ashamed of taking up space in the world. TBH, Mia intimidated the living crap out of me, but I loved her and wished I had half her balls. A girl needed that kind of give-no-fucks to make it out alive, especially with a family like mine.

That said, Uncle Phil wasn’t totally wrong about Darrell. He liked a thrill, and his last girlfriend was absolutely, totally, beyond-a-doubt bonkers. Julie Trim: beautiful, hot-headed, and crazy as a bag of coked-up weasels. They’d been high school sweet-hearts with twin passions for over-the-top drama and collecting weird junk. Forget tragicrafting; my brother and Julie had specialised in rage-tiquing. They’d brawled their way through every garage sale, antique store, and curio-shop east of Toronto. The make-up sex must have been mind-blowing, that’s all I can say.

When they finally broke up for good, Julie went ballistic. Egged our house, put a brick through his windshield, ran him off the road. She sent him a dead rat by Purolator. It’s shitty, but I was glad when she died in wreck a few months later. She scared me.

Whatever my family thought, Mia was the best thing that ever happened to us.

* * *

The earrings were glittering cascades of multi-colour raindrops. They caught the light from the neon signs across the way and painted it across Mia’s pale cheek like battle paint. She held them up to one ear and then the other, stretching her long neck to inspect her reflection in the vendor’s mirror.

“They’re pretty,” I offered. They were, but then again, everything was pretty on Mia. She had that Rumpelstiltskin gift of turning dross to gold. Just look at my brother. He’d been going nowhere at light speed before they met. Now he had a good job and was taking night courses at Algonquin College. If he kept it up, he’d be the first one in the family with a diploma.

“Yeah, they don’t suck, eh?” Mia tossed the earrings back onto the vendor’s table. “Where’d your dumbass brother get to, Dee? He’s got my cash.” There was more affection in that one offhand insult than a lifetime of my mom’s insincere pet names.

“I could get them.” I wanted to get them, because they made her happy. Mia’s smiles took the scary out of the world. Anyway, it was the least I could do given they were letting me stay rent-free. No job, no boyfriend, no prospects; I’d been drifting since graduation. Fumbling my way to nowhere, just like pre-Mia Darrell. I still had no job, and the last thing I needed was another dead-end boyfriend, but the spare room in Mia and Darrell’s Ottawa apartment was hands-down better than my parents’ basement in Cobden.

“Thanks, but no. Never borrow money, never owe anyone anything. Life rules, kiddo. Come on.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the swirling Byward Market crowd. It was Halloween-busy; a crush of tourists, couples out for late-night dinner and drinks, and costumed college kids, ready to hit the clubs. She cut a path, and I followed in her wake like a baby duck, overwhelmed by the lights and sounds and smells. Hot, sweet grease and sugar from the Beaver Tail stand, that artificial fruity red tang from the slushy place down the street. Chocolate and fries and perfume and fall leaves. Sweat and vomit and booze too.

Mia pulled me down George Street and right onto Dalhousie. “He’s probably already at Metro, picking out the steaks. Would it kill him to wait just once?” She sighed dramatically as we hooked a left onto Rideau. The crowds were thinner here, but not by much. Transports belched past on their way to the highway, drowning out the tinny music spilling from open-doored stores and overhead speakers. Whoever’d made the decision to route truck traffic from Quebec through the downtown core was a few cigs short of a pack, but it was all part of the Ottawa feel, to me. Nothing like Toronto or Montreal, but more than cosmopolitan enough for a small-town kid.

“Do you see me going on ahead when he wants to look at that trash he calls antiques? No. I stand there like nice girl and smile and nod while he wastes his cash on collectible crap. Just look at that thing he dragged home yesterday. I mean, seriously. What are we supposed to do with a whole-ass deer skeleton wearing a Santa hat?” She laughed loud enough to turn heads.

“Halloween decoration my ass. But hey, his cash, his crap. And who am I to talk; I would’ve bought those earrings in a hot sec, even though I got twenty pairs just like ‘em. I’m a sucker for sparkle.” She shook her head. “Never try to change someone, kiddo. That’s another rule. You gotta love them for who they are, warts and all. If you can’t do that, it’s time to do everyone a favour and bail.”

She shot me one of those fierce, patented Mia smiles I’d come to love, and I smiled back. I wasn’t sure what either Darrell or I’d done to deserve her, but I wouldn’t trade her for the world.

The blocky brick exterior and bright red sign of the Metro loomed ahead. Mia tightened her grip on my arm and dragged me past the pan-handlers and smokers crowding the entrance way and into the grubby foyer.

“There he i—” She stopped abruptly, and I jostled into her. I blinked away the sudden brightness of the fluorescents and tried to see what had stopped her cold.

Oh.

Darrell, my brother, in front of the gum ball machines. Kissing another woman.

Mia exploded. “Bitch, what the fuck? Get your face off my boyfriend!”

Darrell saw us and his eyes widened. I knew my brother, and that wasn’t guilt. It was fear. The strange woman had him in a bear-hug, arms pinned tight to his sides. I could see his muscles straining. He reached a trembling a hand toward us.

“Oh fuck,” Mia whispered. “Not this, not now. God-damned Halloween…I should’ve fucking figured.” She strode toward the struggling pair, leaving me to scramble after.

“Now what? What’s going on?”

Mia didn’t answer. She grabbed the woman’s dark, glossy hair and wrenched her head back. “Bitch, I said let him go!”

“No!” It was a hiss, and I jumped back with a yelp. What the holy hell? Was that who I thought it was? I shook my head. No way. Couldn’t be.

Couldn’t be hissed again. “You go. He’s mine!”

“In your wildest, bitch,” Mia snarled, and drove a fist into the woman’s stomach.

The woman exploded. Not like angry. She literally exploded. A choking cloud of dust filled the lobby, and I threw my arms over my head as bones clattered to the scuffed linoleum around us.

Silence. Dust settled. Everyone was staring. At me, at Mia and Darrell, at the pile of bones that now littered the floor. Bones and…a Santa hat?

Something that looked like a rib trembled and slid across the floor with a slow, gritty scrape.

“Shit shit shit, here we go again! Come on!” Mia grabbed me with one hand and Darrell with the other and dragged us back onto the street. We plowed through the loiterers to a chorus of shouts and indignation and pelted down the sidewalk, heading east toward King Edward.

“What is it?” I cried. “Who was that? I thought I saw—”

“Shut up! Move! We gotta go!” Mia picked up speed. Her grip was iron, and she towed me along. Darrell kept pace on her other side, blank-faced with fear. I knew that look from when we were kids, back when we used to run hell-for-leather for the fields every time Dad came home drunk and itching for a fight.

“What’s going on?” I gasped.

“She’s after us, that’s what.” Mia threw a glance over her shoulder. “Run!”

I followed her gaze and wished I hadn’t.

It was a deer. Or at least, the skeleton of one. All skull and bone and nothing else but a bright red Santa hat perched jauntily on its antlers. It was galloping down the sidewalk behind us, scattering the crowd, closing the distance with every stride.

We reached King Edward and didn’t pause. Mia threw herself across the road, dragging Darrell and I with her. Into traffic, weaving between cars, dodging bellowing trucks. A pick-up whipped past so close I felt its tailwind, and a little red hatchback came to a honking, stuttering stop two inches from Mia’s knee-high Docs. We kept going. The driver swore, shook a fist, and then screamed as who-know-how-many pounds of skeletal deer crashed across his hood. We dodged another transport and darted around a cyclist to make the other side.

Uphill now, toward Cobourg Street. Mia and Darrell’s Lowertown apartment was in a complex across from MacDonald Gardens Park. If we could make it to the apartment, we’d be safe.

Horns blared and tires screeched behind us. A thud I felt as much as heard, and the rattle of bone on metal. Someone hit it! I slowed to look, but Mia yanked me onward.

“Come on, Dee! That’ll barely slow it down.”

The breath burned in my lungs as we dashed up Rideau and left onto Cobourg. Past run-down townhomes and converted Victorians, their red-brick facades muddy in the dull light of the streetlamps. Screams, shrill in the warm night air, followed behind us, along with the sharp clatter of bony hooves on pavement. Mia was right. It was still coming.

We darted up the walk to their building, Darrell fumbling the keys out of his pocket. Into the lobby we ran, Mia chanting, “Come on, come on,” as he scrabbled with the lock. Then we were through, with the heavy glass door shut behind us.

I staggered to a stop and let my breath go in rush. I was dizzy, panting.

“Okay, what—” It was Darrell who grabbed me this time. He bundled me down the hall and into the waiting elevator.

“Forty feet to the door.” Mia counted on ringed fingers, her black-lacquered nails flashing in the florescent light. “Another what, couple seconds to get the door open? We can do it.” She grabbed my shoulders and gave me a little shake. “As soon as we’re out, Dee, you run, you get me? Right for the door. Darrell’ll be right behind you; he’ll open it up. I need you to grab the baseball bat and throw it to me. Can you do that?”

I nodded.

“You sure? ‘Cause we’re only gonna get one shot at this. I need you to be sure.”

“I’m sure. I can do it.” I was aimless and jobless and a lot of other things. Stunned and confused and scared out of my mind. But I wasn’t useless. Not for Mia. Not when she needed me.

She turned to Darrell. “You good, babe? You got this?”

He nodded, and I saw my own fear and determination echoed on his face. Mia’s faith made us better people than our parents’ curses ever had.

“Alrighty then. Let’s do this, motherfuckers!”

When the elevator doors opened, I ran. No hesitation, no looking back. Darrell thundered at my heels. We reached the apartment door and skidded to a stop. The rumble continued. A hollow, echoing clamor from back the way we’d come. From the stairwell at the far end of the hall.

Darrell shoved his key into the lock, turned, and threw open the door just as the heavy fire door at the end of the hall burst open. Past Darrell, past Mia, I saw it. The deer with its horrible jaunty hat. It lowered its head, aimed cruel, many-pronged antlers toward us, and charged.

I lunged into the dark apartment and cast around for the bat. There it was, right by the door. I grabbed it and scrambled back into the hall.

“Mia!” She caught my throw one-handed.

She whirled, adjusted her grip, and grand-fucking-slammed. Right into that grinning, empty skull. She hit it so hard its antlers went through the drywall. And then she kept hitting, pounding it into the dirty carpet till there was nothing left but bone dust and a hat. When she was done, Darrell scooped up the hat and shoved it down the trash chute.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Mia dumped the last of the dust into a plastic grocery bag and sent it down the trash chute after the hat with an imperious one-finger salute. Darrell was out getting take-out. And Mia’s rain-drop earrings. She’d said it was the least she deserved after all that.

I leaned my broom against the wall and rubbed my back. “So now will you tell me what that was? ‘Cause for a moment, I thought…I thought I saw something I couldn’t have.”

Mia snorted. “Sure you want to know?”

I nodded. I’d just been chased down Rideau Street by a dead deer wearing a Santa hat. Of course I wanted to know.

She shrugged. “You do you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Once it’s out, you can’t put this one back in the package. It’ll fuck your head, that’s for sure.”

“I want to know.”

“Fair enough then. You’re right. You did see her. Your brother’s ex. Julie fucking Trim.”

I gaped. “But…how…?”

“Fucked if I know. I don’t have a clue how that supernatural, ghosty shit works. It’s all horror movies to me. My aunt’s into all that; séances and crystals and whatever. After the first time, I got her to put a whammy on my old baseball bat. Always trust a Slugger. Works every time.”

“First time…every time? This has happened before?”

“Yep. Five and counting. Idiot keeps bringing her home. Last time it was an action figure. One of those collectibles they used to like. Time before that it was a god-damned used car. Bitch tried to go all Christine on my ass. She’s your classic O.A.G.F.”

“OAGF?”

“Overly attached girlfriend. Even dead, bitch can’t take no for an answer.”

End.

Megan M. Davies-Ostrom is a Canadian author with a penchant for literary horror and dark speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of venues including Fantasy Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and anthologies such as Dark Waters and Bodies Full of Burning. Megan lives in Ontario with her husband, daughter, and two (strange) cats. When not writing or carrying-out the duties of her civil-servant alter-ego, she enjoys hiking, reading, and playing board games.

The Other David

By Patrick Barb

I find the other David’s silver and white trailer back in the woods, in a spot I swear I’d driven past twice earlier without noticing anything there at all. Orange and red rust stains along its sides, like mounds of fallen leaves, provide autumnal camouflage for this simple, single-person dwelling. If not for the directions from that gas station clerk back at the highway, I don’t think I’d have ever found the place.

“You sure that’s who you wanna see?” the kid asked. He wouldn’t look at me. Kept staring down at the lotto tickets displayed under the plastic covering on the counter. I peered behind the counter and caught sight of a beat-up copy of The Collected Stories of Kafka and a wrinkled Playboy from the 90’s resting on a stool beside the kid.

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my answer short and trying to hurry things along. Kid got my point and jotted down some rather esoteric (“take the left before the last possible left after you cross the railroad tracks…”) directions on the back of an abandoned receipt.

Having reached my destination, I inch my rental car down the other David’s unpaved driveway. Given the disjointed layout, I’m certain the whole property would never meet the standards of my neighborhood’s homeowner’s association. God knows my wife and I catch enough hell when we let our grass grow a couple of inches too long! It’s a different story out here in the sticks. From the black pick-up truck with the semi-transparent Confederate flag decal across a mud-splattered back window parked beside the dirt bike on its side with a broken kickstand to the trailer itself, perched on moss-covered cement blocks with windows that appear shuttered by layers of waterlogged cardboard and masking tape, the whole mise en scene would receive a firm tsk-tsk’ing.

But it’s the heady mix of spilled motor oil and burnt leaves, a combo so strong it penetrates past the rolled-up windows of the car, that seals the deal. Everything’s adding up to be exactly what I expected, nothing more and nothing less. I’m finding it hard to imagine that what’s about to unfold will amount to anything more than what I’ve expected since leaving Shelly and our little boy Ian back home.

Still, you’ve come this far…

I park, get out of the car, and walk toward the trailer. I’m going through motions I’ve run in my head over and over. I want to act before I can talk myself out of this…whatever the hell it is I’m doing here.

My knuckles rap against a thin metal door that feels ready to crumple if I increase the pressure of my knocks by the slightest degree.

“YEAH? WHAT YOU WANT?”

The other David’s voice booms with a heavy twang from inside the trailer, like I’m back in the car with the radio tuned to some too-loud country-western station.

I realize I’m experiencing something like that moment before a first date when you’re about to come face-to-face with someone who you’ve only heard about from others or experienced solely through phone calls, texts, and online chats. In this instance, I flash on everything I’ve read and re-read online about the other David Dryden—his arrest records and scowling mugshots (but also, that one where he’s smiling). I think about how my writing’s taking off and about the good reviews trickling in. I think about how despite all that, it’s this David Dryden whose face appears whenever I search online for our shared name.

“David Dryden? Hello. I would’ve called ahead but I didn’t know if…”

The door opens before I finish my rehearsed spiel. My perception of the world gets flipped without warning—from the expansiveness of overgrown woodlands to the narrow, clogged confines that the other David appears to exist inside and call “home.” The trailer’s insides are dimly lit, but he doesn’t need to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare as it peeks in over my shoulder.

“Who you supposed to be, man?”

“Pardon me, I’m also David Dryden. I sent you a few messages last week?”

“Okay.”

He steps back from the door but keeps his hands on it, leaving the entryway open.

“Well, come on in,” he says, waving me closer, the way someone might coax a shy, abused puppy to take a scrap of offered food.

Once the thin aluminum door clatters shut behind us, a cold shiver runs across my shoulders and down my spine. I move deeper into the trailer, inching through the narrow, packrat-décor. A space-heater waits for me beside a raggedy, cloth-covered recliner in desperate need of reupholstering.

I’m grateful for the dark blue cardigan Shelly packed for me.

This other David doesn’t appear to have any “Shelly” in his life—let alone his trailer. Like earthquake-ravaged buildings, stacks of dirty dishes stand on uncertain foundations in the sink. A layer of blue-gray dust, like dryer lint, has spread across carpet that’s come loose from its tacking. I wonder what kind of difference Shelly would make here. She keeps every floor of our house so clean. So put-together. And it’s all done while I’m writing, working on my next projects for my editors.

I make a mental note to thank her when I get home. I don’t do it half as much as I should.

The other man, the one who shares my first and last names, wears a sleeveless white t-shirt with lean, muscular arms emerging from the polycotton confines. I don’t see a single goose pimple across his sunburn-splotched skin.

Then again, what does he have to be afraid of? He’s in his home. He isn’t some stranger, traveling miles and miles to come face to face with a man who shares his name and likely little else. Makes me feel a little better, thinking about things from that perspective. I stand a little taller. I’ve come this far, I’m not backing down.

The other David’s tattoos hold my attention. I’m sure it happens to everyone who crosses his path. That he has ink isn’t the surprising part. I expected tattoos. Given his “history,” they felt inevitable. But he must have kept these covered up in his mugshots. I came expecting skulls, barbed wire, maybe an “88” or iron cross. Something outwardly despicable.

I didn’t expect flowers.

But he has flowers all the same. Up and down both arms, bold, primary-colored petals garland his forearms, wrists, and hands. Green leaves and stems interweave, glistening with simulated morning dew. He catches me staring and smiles. It reminds me of that one mugshot of his I’ve come to dread.

I look around the trailer, scrambling for safe conversational ground and making several passes because there’s not that much to see when you get down to it.

In the “kitchen” space across the room, held in place by plastic ABC magnets, two pieces of paper cling to the peeling front of his refrigerator.

One: a misspelled note, written in large, looping cursive script, “Don’t forget PO check-in tomorro.”

Two: a scribbled drawing that my son made for me. Poor guy got so worked about me leaving, taking his blobby rendering of our house and family seemed like the only way to calm him down. Of course, since I didn’t know what to expect down here with other David, I left Ian’s drawing back home. Left it stuck to the front of our refrigerator waiting for my return.

That shouldn’t be there.

Before I can work up the nerve to say anything about it, the other David covers the short distance to the kitchen and stands in front of the fridge, blocking my view of whatever might be displayed there. Alongside the hornet’s buzz of the open refrigerator light, he clears his throat and asks, “Hey man, you wanna beer or somethin’?”

I’m too intimidated to realize he’s got his back to me and can’t see me shaking my head. Instead, I hear the clink of two extracted bottles knocking against each other, followed by the tssh tssh of those same two bottles opened seconds later. The other David walks into what serves as the trailer’s living space and flops down in the recliner. He tucks one bottle by his left leg and holds the other one out for me.

I take it because I want to be a good guest. I’m not planning on drinking it. I’m more of a wine guy, to be honest.

“So we got the same name, huh? First and last?”

I nod because I know he can see me this time.

Goddammit, David. Say something. Ask him something. Anything.

“You going to see any other David Drydens, like me and you. Or what?”

I shrug my shoulders. The other David smiles again. Not the same smile from the mugshot but close enough.

You have to say something. You need to say something.

“Well, no others yet. You just seemed…interesting.”

He takes a long swig from his beer bottle, wiping the back of his hand across his lips when he’s done. Standing across from him, still unsure of where or if I’m going to sit, I feel the cold glass of my bottle against my palm. The cool relaxes me a little, which is great considering how hot and sweaty my hands have become.

“What makes me so interesting to you, other David?”

Hey, that’s YOUR name for him. You’re DAVID and he’s just…the other David.

“Oh, well, it’s—what I read and— My father grew up in a town pretty similar to this one. Not the same but…”

“That so. What’s your old man do now?”

“Oh, he’s retired.”

“What’d he do beforehand? Factory work?”

“Sales.”

“Yeah, okay.”

All of a sudden, I’m overwhelmed by this feeling of being judged. Who is this nobody to judge me or my family or what we’ve done with our lives?

Why do his face, his name (which is my name), and all the stories he lived through, come up whenever I search for myself?

I feel ridiculous. I can’t describe what compelled me to reach out to this total stranger and invite myself over for…this.

This awkward conversation.

But not just that. There’s something else—a vague, but growing unease. Not some “back of the ganglia” fear-sensation either. It’s a burning, itching feeling I can’t shake and it’s far from metaphorical. It’s all I can do to stop scratching up and down my arms, like some crackhead.

“Crackhead.” God, listen to what you’re saying, David. You’re starting to sound like him.

“Do you mind if I take off my sweater?”

The other David holds his arms out from the recliner, hands palms up and ready to receive. I peel the cardigan off my arms and hold it away from my body. Its black cashmere folds and burnished buttons like rust-red eyes remind me of some giant spider in a fantasy novel. I toss the sweater-spider into the waiting arms of the other David. My long-sleeve shirt’s soaked with sweat at the pits and there’s a muggy patch against my chest. I think I’m too close to the space heater, but when I look down there’s no space heater in the room at all. I chalk it up to being something I expected to see, but not something that was ever actually there.

For lack of anything else to drink, thanks to articles I read about the drinking water quality out here where the other David lives, I lift the beer to my lips and take a sip. When I finish, I lift the glass a few inches to my eyes so I can study its contents. One of my eyes appears, reflected big and brown against the curves of the bottle. Brown eyes just like the other David has. The bottle glass is green and my eyes are a frosty blue.

Funny how the light can play tricks on you like that.

“I noticed you have a note about an appointment with a PO on the fridge over there. That’s your parole officer, isn’t it?”

I’m dancing around the question I want to ask.

The one about my son’s drawing and how it got on his refrigerator door. Except when I look over at the fridge again, I’m not so sure that’s what I’m seeing. The capital I, lower-case a, and a capital N that my son used to sign the bottom right corner of his masterpiece in black permanent marker appears more like a smudged streak. More stain than signature. I’m reassured, imagining if look closer I’ll find even more discrepancies.

Except, in everything I read before coming here, I never found nothing about the other David having kids in his life.

Never found anything.

“Yeah, maybe, I do.”

When the other David’s answer comes, I’ve almost forgotten what I’d asked him in the first place. I’ve rolled my sleeves up to my shoulders and my fingernails work overtime on my skin. Pinkish white patches of irritation blossom in the wake of scratches.

“Can I ask what you done—sorry, what you did?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

I look across the living space, hoping to study the other David’s face.

This is why you came here, right? To see how the other half lives?

There’s a couch right across from his recliner. I swear there wasn’t a couch there before, just piles of Guns & Ammo and Auto Trader magazines. I settle down into the worn-in groove of a couch cushion. Right in the same spot where there’s a groove in our couch back home. I look for signs the other David’s kidding, playing that game criminals play where they profess their innocence even when caught red-handed.

Like you know anything about that…

But the look I get back from the other David contains no laughter. No smile. No joy. All I see is fear.

Why?

Shouldn’t I be the one afraid of him?

“I mean, I saw your mugshots. Arrest reports. All of it’s online.”

He leans forward, somehow wearing the cardigan I’d given him to hold. The sweater my wife bought me last Christmas fits him like she’d had it custom-tailored for a stranger. He’s even managed to clasp the few buttons at the bottom of the sweater. They stare back at me, blood-filled eyes pulsing in the darkness. I think he might try and punch me, but I don’t flinch.

His physicality isn’t what scares me now.

I glance behind me, trying to make sure I still have a clear path to the door. The door’s no longer as close as I remember, as though a few feet got added between living space and exit since the time I sat down.

“I think you have me mistaken for someone else,” the other David says.

“Drunk and disorderly, assault, aggravated assault, breaking and entering. They tried to stick you with a hate crime charge just cuz that pussy outside Wheeler’s was a wetb…” I’m reeling off offenses without looking at the man I’m saying they belong to.

A silence, like I just farted in church, settles between us. I don’t have to look up from my study of what appear to be multi-colored bruises up and down my arms with thick, green lines like chlorophyll-laced veins weaving in twisted braids around, to know how the other David’s looking at me.

“Could you please not use that kind of language in my home, sir?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I notice the change in his diction, his word choice, but that’s not all I notice. I just don’t have the time to dwell on what I hear. Because there’s a wall—where there wasn’t a wall before. It separates the room we’re in from the kitchen. But that wall’s not enough to stop the smell of lavender.

No, not any lavender. It smells like Shelly’s lavender candles.

She goes through so many of them, letting a candle burn at one end of the kitchen island from the time she’s home from work until the time dinner’s ready. She’s so exact, precise—from the way she cooks to the brand of candles she buys…

…to the way she hums along to the music playing in her Bluetooth headphones while she moves around the kitchen. Her hips lead the way as she gets lost in whatever song echoes in her head. Ian and I stay out of the way in the living room, waiting to hear, “It’s time to eat.”

Somehow, I’m in the other David’s house, smelling Shelly’s candles. It must be some sense-memory thing because I swear I can hear my wife in his kitchen too. But she’s back home—in our home—probably moving around our full-sized kitchen.

I stand and stare up at a ceiling that’s much too high. The other David’s words come like the buzzing of a fly by your bedside before you turn out the lights and drift off to dreamland. A syllable—some half-heard sound—breaks through, and I flinch. I stretch my arms out in front of me, thinking they’ll protect me from whatever the hell’s happening here. The details of the bruises continue coming into focus. Black outlines provide shape and structure to a kaleidoscopic presentation of colors. Bright pinks, creamy whites and yellows, reds like blood, and green—so much verdant green.

“Are you okay, David?”

The other David lets his hillbilly twang fall by the wayside, and instead, his delivery sounds like a mockery of my speech patterns. I recognize the same inflections and intonations that would come if I’d been the one to ask that question.

Are you okay, David?

“Fine. Jest…just…need bathroom.”

He points the way, saying something about the guest bathroom being by the stairs. But that can’t be right.

You can’t have stairs inside a trailer.

I nod and try to say thank you, but I’m practically grunting, like a pig fallen headfirst into the shit-pile. My ears turn red like the rest of my skin and I shuffle out of the room.

At least it’s easy to find my way around, thanks to a strong sense of déjà vu running in lazy loops at the back of my mind. The other David’s got pictures on his walls. Him and some woman. She looks a hell of a lot like Shelly. Wears the same clothes, has the same hairstyles depicted across the years. There’s something else in some of those photos, a smaller person, or at least a person-like shadow.

My eyelids feel heavy. Like I want to cry but forgot how. The beer bottle is in my hand still. Empty. I don’t remember having any more to drink. Isn’t the other David supposed to be the beer drinker?

This place feels like mine, but it isn’t mine.

This all belongs to the other David.

Confused and disoriented though I may be, I still get to keep one secret, one deception, for myself.

I’m not heading to the bathroom. That’s the lie. Lying feels like something I do now, even though I have this memory of coming here, seeking something true, something real. I came for someone—something—bearing my name that wasn’t me.

I don’t need to know how far away the front door is now or how the space between here and there has stretched like Silly Putty.

I don’t need to know if there’s an impossible staircase around the corner with more framed pictures of suburban bliss.

All that matters is knowing what waits for me in the kitchen.

I step through clouds of lavender smoke. A woman moves around the island. Her dance is neither welcoming nor foreboding. Because it is for no one’s satisfaction but her own. She covers up just enough porcelain-white skin. Pure like fresh-fallen snow. Her eyes closed, the faded stain of lipstick marks her silent mouthing along to the words of whatever song plays in her headphones. She has one of those familiar faces. I feel like I should know her. Know her name, her story, the way she likes to be kissed, and the way she might kiss back with an intense sense of ownership, where even a “have a good day at the office” peck lets the recipient know “you’re mine. all mine.”

But I don’t know her. And when she finally notices me standing in the room with her, she looks at me like I’m a stranger. No, not a stranger. THE stranger. The one they warn little girls and little boys about. The one from the wrong side of the tracks with bad intentions and a wicked heart.

“David?”

She says my name like a question. But it’s not directed at me. The recliner creaks in the other room. I hear the other David talking to someone else, “Hang out here, buddy. Daddy’s gonna go help that man in the kitchen with Mommy.”

The other David sounds just like you, David.

“Sorry, uh, ma’am. Wann’ed have a look at your fridge.” No, that’s what I sound like. Dirt from dirt. The other David sounds like the voice in my head, the one telling a story of who I’m supposed to be. But that voice grows fainter. Like another broadcast is coming in with a stronger signal.

Who’s that other David talking to back there? You had to walk so far to get to the kitchen. Man practically lives in a mansion.

Bet he was talking to the shadow.

It’s the shadow I haven’t seen yet, but know is there. I feel its presence everywhere inside the house. It’s the shape in the photos on the wall. It’s back there now, sitting in front of the other David’s recliner, drawing pictures in crayon on rainbow-colored construction paper pieces.

“I like your flowers.”

The woman in the kitchen is talking about my tattoos. The ones covering both arms from shoulder to down past my knuckles. Because, of course. That’s where all the colors come from.

These tattooed flowers are the only beautiful thing I’ve ever offered to the world.

Right on cue, here comes the other David—family man, good boy—reflected beside me in the stainless steel surface of his refrigerator door. I’m there too. It takes a minute to focus, to figure out who’s who. “David, is everything okay?”

I take the picture down, letting the magnet clatter to their kitchen floor.

Husband and wife keep their distance, probably thinking I won’t see ‘em doing it. But I do. I hold the picture up for them. I point to the box and triangle house, the round red sun, and the grass blades like sharp teeth. “This is mine,” I tell them.

The woman—Shelly, I think the other David said her name was—has her hand on her phone. Its screen is still black, but for how long? The other David speaks slowly like he must think I’m some kind of dumb. “David, that’s not yours. That’s not your house, your front yard…”

I thrust my arm forward, fingers wrinkling the top edge of the construction paper where childish scrawl reads “FoR DADY.”

“Dammit, look.”

With my free hand, I tap my index finger against more details. The man shape, the woman shape. The shadow shape.

The shadow’s here with us now. Like an artist’s scribble walking, talking, leaning against the other David and his pretty young thing of a wife. It reminds me of the swirled, indistinct mess of a signature at the bottom of the paper I hold in my hand.

“That’s not yours, David.”

This fucking entitled asshole, who the hell does he think he is?

“You didn’t draw that. No one you know drew that. My son drew it. My son’s right here. He’s always been here. Isn’t that right…”

I feel this vacuum around us, all the air suddenly sucked from the room. It’s all I can do to speak and finish what the other David started. “Ian?”

“Yes, Ian.”

The boy stands between his parents. Because, of course, he does. He’s always been there.

I let go of the paper and watch it swoop and slalom down to the floor.

“I think you should leave,” the other David says.

I step on his kid’s drawing on the way out, making my mark one way or another. I leave their pristine home, step out onto their pristine front lawn, and walk across the grass. Some of their neighbors are out in their driveways. Staring at my truck and the Rebel Flag decal I got back there in the window. Good. Fuck ‘em if they got something to say to me about it.

This ain’t my world and it never was. Just cuz some asshole shares the same name as you, that don’t mean it means a damn thing. I got caffeine pills and some of the stronger, whiter stuff in my glove compartment for the long drive back home.

Still, it’ll be past time for my parole check-in even if I drive all night. I can already see those red and blue lights flashing across my rusted-out old trailer. Red and blue and red and blue, smearing across into the violet of a bruise.

I get my smile ready for the pigs. Because I know something they don’t know. And I won’t let them hear all the other Davids, all of them screaming inside me tonight.

End.

Patrick Barb is an author of weird, dark, and horrifying tales, currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Gargantuana’s Ghost (Grey Matter Press), Turn (Alien Buddha Press), and Helicopter Parenting in the Age of Drone Warfare (Spooky House Press). His debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting is forthcoming from Keylight Books / Turner Publishing in October 2023. In addition, he is an Active Member of the HWA and a Full Member of the SFWA. Visit him at patrickbarb.com or follow him at twitter.com/pbarb

Art by Maxwell Marais

No One Warns You

By S.P. Miskowski

From the day of my birth, I was known by a title. My mother never got tired of mentioning it. After she ran through all of the relatives in our extended family, she started introducing herself to strangers, striking up conversations in waiting rooms, airports, and shopping malls. Purely for the chance to tell someone she had three daughters: an heir, a spare—and a little surprise.

“We didn’t see that one coming,” was her punchline.

No one failed to chuckle politely on cue. Mother had that effect on people. She dominated every scene of her life, even among people who had never met her before. Born poor, she carried herself with a royal attitude. Beyond confidence, she was endowed with an unshakeable belief that anything occurring to her at any given time must have universal significance. If she sneezed, some creature somewhere in the world caught a cold.

Without doubt, Eileen was our mother’s daughter. Her confidante, best friend, and spitting image. Same hourglass figure, same drop-dead stare, insouciant half-smile, and penchant for judging character with an eerie accuracy. Every time she turned her gaze toward me, however briefly, I felt guilty of something.

Polly was next in line. Polly, the spare. Pretty enough and clever enough to serve, in Eileen’s absence. They were busy young women. Their combined social calendar was an actual paper chart under constant revision and prominently displayed on the kitchen wall where the whole family could appreciate it.

As a lowly understudy to Polly, and the one least likely to be called up for any familial duty, I made the perfect secretary. Many hours of my childhood were spent taking dictation from my mother and typing her letters of complaint to various companies and individuals.

Dear Mr. Plouffe,

As Customer Service Manager for Cad-Mere Kitchen Appliances, likely you have received a fair share of compliments on the color scheme and design of your latest gadget, the Whole Lemon Grinder. It is, indeed, an attractive device.

Although I have no wish to subvert the pleasantness of anyone’s workday, I am afraid my honest observations on the Whole Lemon Grinder’s performance may unavoidably ruin your afternoon…

She only spoke this formally when she was dictating letters. She might stand at the kitchen sink, arms sunk to the elbows in soapy water, a dreamy vacancy to her eyes as she reeled off pejorative descriptions of toasters, salad tongs, convection ovens, blenders, and cookbooks. Or she might kneel before a tomato vine in the back yard, staring it down, daring it to fail under her care. She would give parts of the plant she called “lazy” a jab or a thwack with one finger. And suddenly she would snap, “Take a letter!”

Wire-rimmed spectacles perched on my nose, battered notebook in one hand and pencil stub in the other, I would follow her from one household task to another, scribbling and revising her many thoughts on a variety of products and services she had sampled cheaply and found wanting. Her youth had been hardscrabble at best, with barely a high school education, and she was determined not to be conned. Long after my dad’s life insurance put a sturdy roof over our heads and a bit of savings in the bank, it was my mother’s great pleasure in life to heartily complain about the inadequacies of things she bought at a discount.

Meanwhile Polly and Eileen were busy gleaning makeup tips from glossy fashion magazines. Magazines Mother said she didn’t have time to read. My sisters practiced each technique until it was perfected. Afterward, on special occasions and holidays, they gave Mother what she called “a freshen-up.” They spent hours in her room, curling, backcombing, brushing, layering, smoothing, gluing false eyelashes, adding touches of color, telling stories, trading jewelry, laughing, lowering their voices to a whisper whenever anyone approached the half-closed door.

Just before party time, all three would emerge from the room, which now smelled of laundry, lotions, heady perfume, and the sugary stench of slightly burnt hair. Ordinary women, yet they spent the rest of the day gliding rather than walking, leaning gracefully rather than sitting, chatting and refusing plates of food, offering the wan smile of someone who looks her best and knows it.

Like royalty, we had our titles and obligations. Eileen and Polly were never enlisted to take dictation. I was never included in the women’s preparation for weddings, reunions, birthday parties, or family photos. Nothing was said about this until the images were impatiently pried from the developing service’s paper envelope. Then everyone would nod, and everyone would agree that Mother had never looked better, and her daughters Eileen and Polly were so lucky to take after such a handsome and charming woman.

Oh, and there was the other daughter, the one in the corner with the blank expression. Lank brown hair and skinny legs. The little surprise. Me.

Some families take these designations seriously. Others pretend not to. The thing is: titles contain some essential truth. Not about who we are, but about how we’re supposed to fit in, and where we fall in the grand scheme. If we were smarter than most humans are, we could see what our nicknames tell us about our loved ones, and we would flee the nest much sooner.

You might think a woman with a part-time bookkeeping job, a husband who expected home-cooked meals, and the responsibilities of parenthood would naturally avoid additional projects. But she could see the future, when the heir and the spare would graduate from high school and move on to college or marriage. The gaping possibility of a nest empty except for the one-girl stenographic pool may have driven Mother a teensy bit crazy.

I was thirteen when she decided I needed braces on my teeth. Not that there was anything horribly wrong. But there were tiny eccentricities, imperfections.

This wasn’t the first time Mother tried to improve me. Her efforts at converting my diffident nature to a more well-rounded identity had prompted a long line of complaints.

Dear Mrs. Tryon,

You may possess an impressive degree of expertise as a seamstress, but you obviously lack the fashion sense and sophistication I had hoped you would impart to my youngest daughter…

Dear Mr. Gregory,

We no longer wish to engage your service. Following eight months of daily practice, my daughter is unable to play more than the opening bars to Ode to Joy on the piano. This is inadequate and, frankly, disappointing…

Dear Master Gee,

My daughter will no longer be able to attend lessons at your karate academy. Apparently, she has no aptitude for martial arts. Judging by the fourteen bruises on her legs, arms, and abdomen after one visit to freestyle class…

Braces were a different matter. They didn’t require any great effort on my part. Mother decided I couldn’t fail at acquiring straight teeth.

Funny how many painful things there are in life, and no one warns you in advance. No one takes time to describe the awkwardness and bloodstains involved in losing your virginity, or the excruciating details of childbirth. My sisters had spent a good deal of their teen years whining and lounging around. This seemed to be their normal behavior. So, I didn’t connect their foul moods with menstruation until my first period.

I wasn’t one of those girls who appear to take every bizarre disruption to their bodies in stride. The smelly, degrading miseries of womanhood consumed me. The pain was otherworldly. I was struck dumb by it. Sometimes I couldn’t even stand up. My periods were heavy, each gigantic wet clot sliding out like a handful of warm pudding. I grew lightheaded, imagining giving birth to enormous slugs—over and over and over.

Into this hell, my mother introduced something I would never have thought possible: Even more pain.

“You can’t go through life with those incisors,” she said at the dinner table one night, paraphrasing a dentist friend’s recommendation. “Pretty soon people will think you’re a vampire. And then they’ll think I’m a vampire. No. I’m not going to wait. We need to see a specialist and get this rolling.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“In my day, we took a dose of castor oil and went about our business,” she said. It was a statement she used in numerous conversations. It meant nothing. It represented all she was willing to say.

By phone, she consulted with Eileen and Polly, both of them now married and expecting children of their own. Both assured her she was spending her money wisely.

“At least she’ll be presentable.”

“She doesn’t know how lucky she is. I wish I’d had braces!”

The dentist friend referred Mother to an orthodontist who took a bunch of x-rays. They examined the murky images together on a screen.

“We’ll need to surgically remove the impacted wisdom teeth, and these molars,” said the orthodontist, tapping the lit screen with a pencil eraser.

Even I could see it. Two sets of unnecessary teeth, lying almost horizontally, lying in wait, preparing to push anything in their path into complete disarray. I couldn’t understand why the molars had to come out too, and no one could explain it in a way that made sense.

Today there are less archaic and ugly methods for adjusting one’s bite. In those days, there was only one approach.

I’m told there are parents who can’t bear to see their offspring in pain. Presumably these parents would have shied away from an optional procedure that left their child doubled over, nauseated, bleeding, swallowing one aspirin tablet after another, and chomping on gauze to soak up the pulpy mess.

Here’s another one of those things people forget to mention: The metallic shrieking pain in your temples and behind your eyes won’t go away when you begin to heal. Despite all the wires and bands in your swollen mouth, your flesh tries to become whole, or at least scar over. Every time the agony settles into a dull ache, and you think it’s almost possible to walk upright again, the orthodontist tightens the wires.

From the first surgery, in which the orthodontist struggled mightily to extract the wisdom teeth from my gums, at one point placing his knee on my chest and tugging at the forceps with both hands, my life was changed. My only choices were to visit the torture chamber to have my braces tightened on days when my period was due, or to visit when I wasn’t menstruating. Choosing the latter meant some part of my body would be in distress at all times.

These long-term procedures wore me out and changed the way I saw the world. I stopped taking dictation and typing Mother’s letters of complaint. I lacked the energy to do more than sit upright in class, slump through the bus ride home, and collapse on the sofa. I lived on soup and soft foods like mashed potatoes. When I brushed my teeth, the inside of my face felt like it had been sliced with barbed wire and doused with alcohol. I brushed less as time went by.

The thing is, I went along with all of this for one reason: No one said no to Mother. Not ever. But the experience skewed my belief that she was doing this for my well-being. Once doubt entered the equation, with a wicked smile of its own, I could never trust her again. Not that I was an especially sensitive child, or an ambitious one. My nature was to enjoy whatever was on offer for as long as it lasted, and then move on. Whatever good fortune came my way was welcome but unanticipated. Going forward, instead of expecting nothing from life, I expected pain.

Two conditions plagued me after the braces were removed. The needle-sharp pain in my head continued and was eventually diagnosed as migraine; and my canines and incisors were riddled with cavities. For Mother, these facts were only further proof of my slovenly habits.

“If only you had stuck to the daily cleaning regimen,” she said. “You would have a beautiful smile now.”

I moved out of Mother’s house on my eighteenth birthday, planning never to look back. I got a job cleaning bathrooms and took college courses at night. I lived in a one-room apartment with a shower stall, a hot plate, one sink, and a roommate named Susie. I worked my way through school and eventually landed a halfway decent position as a receptionist. Fortunately, the company projected a serious demeanor because every day, in every situation, I avoided smiling.

The beaming radiance promised by the orthodontist never appeared. I struggled with migraine headaches until a sympathetic doctor prescribed meds to help take the edge off. My first female gynecologist correctly diagnosed my menstrual agony as menorrhagia. A change of diet to whole grains, nuts, vegetables, and fish helped a lot. In other words, on my own I was able to live almost normally. Almost.

I never noticed the smell. Not in the beginning and not ever. Blame olfactory fatigue, or maybe general fatigue. I only knew my mouth emitted a foul odor because it came up in conversation on dates. First dates, which were usually last dates. I asked a co-worker if my breath seemed offensive. She sniffed and smiled stiffly and said no, no, no, obviously lying.

I kept a bowl of mints at the reception desk and perfected the habit of tucking my chin when I spoke to clients and visitors. I developed a reputation for being a bit cool but very efficient. I ate mints for lunch and flossed three times a day. I went to a dentist for cleaning, and nodded thoughtfully while the hygienist gave me the same sales pitch I’d heard from four different dentists in the past ten years.

“You can keep having these tiny cavities filled,” she said. “Of course, it’s your decision. The new cavities are actually opening around older fillings, you see?” She pointed to my reflection. “These will go on spreading until the integrity of each tooth is compromised. The alternative, which I recommend, is to crown the incisors and canines along with the cracked molar.”

Ten crowns would cost tens of thousands of dollars. I opted for the fillings my dental insurance covered at 80%. I opted for fillings until my teeth were nothing but fillings. I smiled with my mouth tightly shut. I greeted people by turning away from them and scooping up the bowl on my desk.

“Would you like a mint?”

* * *

As an adult with a job and a lease and a car and a couple of credit cards, I visited my mother on her birthday and holidays, and I begged off on anything more. The drive from my place to her house was only twenty minutes. Yet I lost track of her projects and shopping expeditions. I didn’t want to hear the details of her feud with a neighbor. I could live without the occasional lunch date where she would regale a captive-audience waitress with her brassy announcements.

“This one,” she would drawl, pointing at me between sips of Mojito. “She’s a real gift. The last gift my husband gave me before he dropped dead. Can you believe it? Ha-ha-ha!”

She had a habit of tilting her head back when she laughed, letting her amusement subside at its own pace. If anyone nearby gave her an unpleasant glance, she would turn and gawk at them until they apologized or left their table.

The older I got, the less time I spent with her. And the more time I spent thinking about the two of us. For a while, I nurtured the adult equivalent of a child’s fantasy that they’ve been stolen by pirates. I’d seen medical records, I had my birth certificate, yet it seemed impossible I could be related to the vivacious, commanding woman who scheduled every half hour of my days when I was in grade school and once gave such a tongue lashing to the dry cleaner’s delivery man that he refused to service our entire street for fear of running into her.

I didn’t believe I could be made of the same material. But I tried. I tried to be more like her, now and then.

When my car repairs were twelve days late, I summoned up every bit of Mother I could remember and won a shouting match with the mechanic. The next day, my car was ready to be picked up. Everything was fine until the next heavy rain. Two inches of water ran through four holes the mechanic had drilled under the dashboard. I couldn’t afford to repair it or trade it in. After a while I got used to the odor of mildew. It reminded me to keep my tiny mouth shut.

There was the baker I sniped at when he made lewd remarks to one of his employees, resulting in a birthday cake with my co-worker’s name misspelled. There was an usher I chided for taking another ticketholder ahead of me. She said she was very sorry, really sorry, and then she directed me to a section on the wrong side of the theatre just as the show was starting.

Every time, my false bravado failed. Because it wasn’t my nature, only a brief attempt at disguising myself. I couldn’t get away with anything. Mother was the flash of crimson light across the beach at sunset. And I was the sand on that beach.

All of this changed when she had a stroke. She didn’t lose speech or basic mobility, but she had to slow down. And she was ordered not to drive.

Eileen and Polly sent endless updates. How she looked. How she felt. What she said. How she seemed. How she wanted me to stop by.

I stopped listening to their chatty, judgmental voicemail. There was no point in talking to them, and nothing I could say in defense of myself. My staying away was selfish. To tell my sisters it was also necessary for my survival would have earned their contempt.

“Gotcha!” Polly’s cheerfully snotty voice was unmistakable. Her greeting retroactively justified every time I’d remembered to check my phone before answering.

“Hi, Polly, what’s up?”

“Oh. Seriously?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. Glancing around the empty lobby, failing to find an excuse to hang up.

“I know you’re busy,” she said. “So busy with your career and whatnot. But listen, Eileen and I are going on a cruise.”

“A cruise? On a ship?”

“Only expectant mommies allowed. Mommy Spa and Mommy Jacuzzi. It’s only for one night and one day, it’s a gift from a friend, and we’re going, so you’ll have to check on Mother.”

“What the hell?” I asked before I could edit my response.

“You never pull your weight,” she told me.

“What are you saying? She’s a burden?”

“Tomorrow night, and the following day,” she said and hung up.

I was sure this wasn’t Mother’s idea. I also doubted my sisters were so taxed by their lives as affluent homemakers they needed a holiday without their husbands. This was spite. This was Eileen and Polly choosing their path and hating it at the same time. Both of them wanted to make me pay for something, and this was a convenient opportunity.

On the designated evening, I called Mother. She laughed at my concern. She said she would love to go on a cruise, but no one ever invited her. She poured herself a glass of red wine and said goodnight.

* * *

If I’d checked my phone before I went to bed and fell asleep with some painfully breezy late night talk show burbling in the background, I would have heard the garbled message. Two things I’d never heard in her voice before: confusion and fear. I’ve only listened to it once, but I didn’t have the nerve to erase it.

“You better come on… better come on, then… now I don’t… well… what’s the matter… you hear me… hear me?”

Eileen and Polly were livid. Eileen even suggested to the police that I might be responsible for Mother’s death. An aging woman suffers a second stroke and dies quietly in her bed. The police gave her the number for a therapist specializing in bereavement. I know because she mailed it to me with a note saying maybe I should seek help.

Our estrangement was complete after Mother’s lawyer explained the terms of her will. The value of her house, savings, car, and jewelry were to be split three ways, with love.

My sisters didn’t speak to me after that. They organized a memorial and forgot to invite me. They accepted their share when the house was sold. And they went their own way, maybe on a cruise.

My next visit to the dentist revealed more decay. More rot than I could conceal with floss and mint. This time, I compared the cost of crowns to the amount left by my mother. Surely, she meant for me to use the money for self-improvement. Maybe it was also a kind of apology, as unlikely as this might be.

I said yes, at last. Sure, take my teeth, take as many as you like.

Dental impressions reminded me of the preliminary steps to getting braces. Shivering, ice in my veins, I lay in the sleek leather chair and cranked my mouth this way, that way. The plaster like cold cement. The tock and thwack of the impression as it’s pulled free.

I can’t relay what went on. I can’t recall how many hours they spent drilling. I can’t connect with it. There was so much, and it went on for so long.

If I hadn’t been drunk, I would have given in to an ever-present temptation to fall apart. Just walk to the center of the waiting room and fall away in bits and pieces.

A clumsy row of temporary crowns made me feel like a cartoon beaver. They were attached to one another, making all of them feel too snug. Only the allure of a mint-free existence and a corresponding bump in self-esteem kept me going.

At last, the jewels arrived. Polished, white but not glaring, and bearing a slight resemblance to my real teeth. The ones that no longer existed, drilled to powder and broken bits of enamel.

The fitting took forever. My capacity for sitting still with my mouth clamped wide open ended about two-thirds of the way through. My thoughts drifted up and away, watching with mild interest as yet another qualified professional mauled my face with tubes and swabs and metal tools. I wondered if this would be what I thought of in the last moment of my life. I wondered what Mother was thinking the second before a blood vessel burst and her brain malfunctioned.

I was smart enough to take several accrued vacation days. It was strange lying in bed, scuzzy and stupid on Vicodin. Maybe the painkillers ignited a sentimentality I didn’t know I possessed. I kept thinking of Mother and her letters.

To the chief librarian at our local branch. To the county office responsible for painting street signs. To the person who chose the season’s perfume bottle theme, at Avon. To the makers of an electric can opener she somehow held responsible for a cracked teacup.

My gums ached and throbbed, despite the Vicodin and Tylenol and two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. I slept and my dreams flew by in garish beach resort colors, blaring radio music without meaning.

Twice I awoke, or thought I awoke, unable to get out of bed. I lay in a stupor, my cheekbones and jaw expanding, growing heavy, and a metallic band tightening around my head.

Two days later, my face was a bit less tender. But for some reason it felt puffed up, still swollen.

I staggered from bed to the bathroom. Letting the night lights in wall sockets follow my movements instead of flipping the overhead light switch.

Cool water flowing over my hands. Checking the mirror. Ever so gently pressing my cool palms against my jaw. My chin. My temples. My nose. And a mouth I didn’t recognize on my face.

Slapping at the light switch, flinching in the shock of illumination, I caught only a whisper of a sly grin receding and disappearing. My startled eyes stared back at me.

“No more Vicodin tonight.” I turned off the lights and went back to bed.

On Tuesday the dental assistant called. Checking on my progress ahead of my follow-up appointment. Making sure I was adjusting and doing okay and feeling okay and everything was okay. Was I doing okay?

I took a deep breath. I didn’t have a thought in my head.

“Dear Natalie,” I said. “How kind of you to contact me after all this time. Almost a week. What can I say? The pain is excruciating. Every movement is like walking on shards of broken glass. Yet you limit my access to drugs that make me feel less pain and encourage me to take completely ineffective ones that might damage my liver. Well, thank you so much for calling.”

I hung up on her. When I saw her again, at my follow-up, she wouldn’t make eye contact, but she was very careful not to cause me anymore distress.

About a month later, when my nerves were truly beginning to settle, I happened to wake up in the middle of the night craving a glass of mineral water. Zombielike, I lumbered to the kitchen, poured a glass of Pellegrino from the fridge, and when I closed the door I was staring into the stainless steel surface at my mother’s face.

I studied the image in the dim glow of the kitchen counter light. Surely the metal door was distorting my features. How had my jaw shifted, and how had my mouth become more pronounced?

My crowns, so carefully crafted from a perfect dental impression, did not match my old teeth. They were larger and brighter. They were nothing like me.

* * *

Everyone at the office complimented me profusely. Co-workers began stopping by the reception desk, just to chat. In the past I usually ran out of cheap conversation after a brief, banal exchange. Now I had an opinion about everything.

“Hot pink does brighten the atmosphere, but it’s a childish color. I don’t know how anyone could live with it long-term.”

“That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. What was the scene at the end, with the two guys sweeping the sidewalk after the old man dies? It doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they sweep it before he died?”

“The person who created this software must have been raised in a basement. Normal people have lives, and we don’t have time to solve tech problems.”

None of these subjects mattered to me. Yet I couldn’t stop asserting my views. The more I talked, the more people seemed to enjoy my company.

But was this me? The unabashed sarcasm, the sneer passing as a voluptuous smile? The face I see in the mirror each day becomes more distinct. It could be nothing more than a new manifestation of some as-yet unidentified pain.

Dozens of negative Yelp reviews can only make the world better, by pointing out what people are doing wrong. The reviews indicate a new phase of my life. I’m thinking of sharing this outlook with my sisters one day. Just drive over, catch them at lunch together beside the pool, and give them a little constructive criticism.

It has also crossed my mind to tear out all of these big, pretty, expensive teeth. To claw them free of the gums and rip them clean out of my head. To hack them out with a knife and crush them with a hammer.

One thing stops me. What if I cut and slash and pull them loose, what if I spit them one by one into the sink? What if I return the flesh of my face to its natural position, free of them?

What if I do all that, and my face is still not my own? The bones that made it mine no longer exist. Only the shape of her exists now. Only her mouth, speaking for me.

End.

S.P. Miskowski’s stories have appeared in the anthologies Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, as well as the magazines Supernatural Tales, Identity Theory, Black Static, and Strange Aeons. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations.

Ex Oblivione: Nothing Out of the End

By Maxwell I. Gold

I.

Inside the oblivion of sleep, I pressed through the starry gates of never-again where silver daggers scratched at the nape of my tired consciousness. Familiar voices like cackling gods carried me into the amethystine night underneath the guise of stars that were eyes, pulling back the awful realizations bleeding from my skull,

Familiar voices,
and terrible places

I’d been here once before, or two in moments unable to recall within the oblivion of sleep where gods died, and demons cut at my body with rusty knives. I’d woken up few mornings with blood and abrasions, but recalled nothing except,

Familiar voices,
inside terrible places,

With no way out, while unreasonable gods carried on into the dank galactic recesses as if my pain was some trivial jubilation; the immense shadows encroaching around me, a lethal paresthesia paralyzed my body blasted with,

Familiar voices,
and terrible places.

Places without reason or structure, daggers that reached the heavens with eyes melting from the stars whose crimson slime and purple ooze clogged my lungs and there was no escape. Only to hope that I’d find refuge inside the oblivion of sleep, over and over again a relentless, deadly repetition of what-was or what-never-would-be, trapped by,

Familiar voices,
and terrible places

Trapped in the space between cracks locked in memories like crumbs beneath yellow nails too terrible for sight, but familiar to the mind so fragile burdened and blasted. Sleep was a luxury unattainable in the world unreachable,

Familiar voices,

And terrible places,

II.

Soon disappeared through the madness and mania as if the music of molten histories brought by the Cyber Gods was all but some faulty misfire, a stroked glitch in the grey-matter ruins sloshing in my head,

Back and forth,
inside and out

Until there was no more music, no comprehension of oblivion, or even the faint painful reminders of familiar and terrible dreams. The static and somber what-ifs where I longed for the sweet kiss of Oblivion’s embrace grew into not dreams, but nightmares that stained the viscera of my brain,

Inside and out,
all around,
the hideous murals of some far-off Thing who chose me as their unwilling, hierophantic vessel.

To fill, to amplify, to birth something beyond primal reason, to never understand but throb within the star-webbed nethers of tomorrow,

Inside and out,
all around,

Until the wide, mass that was Oblivion embraced me once more,

III.

Until I was broken, nameless, and empty, a vial drained of what was once blood and song. The days long passed when I saw stars turned to sand, gods to stone, and now, that bludgeoned executioner who held the desperate moments of my finality was but, ash and laughter,

Ash and laughter, I’ve heard it before, all and all
down
this
road
through
this
door

Into a world I didn’t belong, but seldom regretted the time spent where ((names)) meant nothing and pantheons crumbled every morning like the next sunrise and yet there was no answer. Not call, or clarity, but laughter through doors inside the night in the executioner’s palace.

The days long passed, not fast enough though I longed for the sweet glaive of oblivion to sever the insipid neurons from their pathetic strands, my torturous consciousness, it never came;
down
this
road
only broken prayers and oxidized snow which sprinkled my lips as if seasoning my body for the hell to come. Come through
this
door

And bring me light. Give me fire, I’d cry, but too late I saw the days pass into shadow and song as I laid against the towers of someday, shattered like glass broken, nameless, and empty.

IV.

Blood and song, sing the music of endless stars,

Blood and song, the anthems of Gods who cared not for tomorrow or cursed yesterday, but laughed in the familiar voices,

Choral chants like ghosts of never-before, or spectral things Shadows which clung to the skies while children remained in their beds, away from terrible men who screamed

Blood and song, sing the music of endless stars,

Blood and song, the anthem that called dark men to places without return beneath the guise of faceless monsters who laughed with bellies full of billions like me. Stars which never shined, nor the chance to sing, but drowned by

Blood and song, to sing the music of godless stars,

Blood and song, the wretched curse of the Cyber Gods

Fourteen billion years towards the beginning of all things as if they were the first ghosts, the dread-voices who curled my ears in the night whispering

Blood and song,
blood and song,
sing the music of godless stars
until stars bleed no more.

End.

Maxwell I. Gold is a multiple award nominated author who writes prose poetry and short stories in weird and cosmic fiction. He is a regular contributor to Spectral Realms, and his work has also appeared in Weirdbook Magazine, Space and Time Magazine, Startling Stories, Strange Horizons and many anthologies and magazines. Maxwell is also the author of Oblivion in Flux: A Collection of Cyber Prose from Crystal Lake Publishing.

He’s a proud Columbus, Ohio native and currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Horror Writers Association as the Treasurer for the organization.

by Pietro Rotelli

The Weeds and the Black Spot

By Shannon Ives

After it begins, she won’t be able to recall which came first: the weeds or the black spots.

They arrive in the Green Mountains at the beginning of August. It’s the hottest time of year in Vermont, but the eighty-degree weather is a welcome reprieve from the triple-digit temperatures that the South currently enjoys, and will continue to, until well into October. She already feels the kiss of autumn in the summer evenings; she sees it in the way the deep emeralds of the leaves are beginning to melt into a waxy yellow. She wants to revel in it, the natural cycling, but instead of rejuvenating her like she’s hoped, the move has sapped her dry.

* * *

“The Perseids are tonight,” he breathes into her neck, and though they’re still reveling in a post-coital tangle, fresh, electric goosebumps prickle along her arms. The mattress is the only piece of furniture in the room. The rest, scheduled to arrive any day now, consumed the final scraps of their meager savings that the old farmhouse’s down payment left intact. “Let’s go up the hill. We can lay down a blanket, make a few wishes. It will be romantic.”

She considers the offer. He’s right, it would be romantic, and for the rest of their lives, they’d have the chance to tell their future child that they’d been conceived beneath a shower of stars. Hadn’t she dragged him out here, into one of the least populated states in the nation, citing exactly these types of natural phenomenon and the remoteness as benefits? Who was going to stop them from making love in the open, on their new acres? And beneath a meteor shower. It was exactly the type of image she’d conjured a few weeks ago when she thought about what her future held. But even though she’s thousands of miles away from her old self, she fears the worst has happened—that somehow, despite uprooting her entire life, she’s still fundamentally unchanged. That at her core, she’s just as empty as the suburban women they moved here to escape. The dream-her, the vision of who she wants to be, agrees to his proposal without question. And yet, here is the cold reality, mocking her: climbing up that short hill and lying on the hard earth is the last thing she’s interested in doing. Instead of wrapping her arms up around his back, instead of drawing him down to her once more, she slides herself out from underneath him, reaching for the darkened phone resting beside them on the hardwood floor.

No work waits for her there, but he doesn’t know that. “Oh shit,” she murmurs noncommittally as she thumbs open her empty inbox, conjuring an emergency out of thin air, and when she looks back to him, she catches a flash of disappointment as it flickers across his tender face. But instead of sulking, he shrugs with a smile and doesn’t push the issue. Guilt tugs at her insides, she banishes it quickly—won’t they be back here in a few hours anyway? The double blue lines on the ovulation strips this afternoon dictated as much.

That night, after they make love again beneath their plain white ceiling adorned only with a dusty ceiling fan, he walks up the hill to watch the stars fall alone.

* * *

The blossoms are waiting for her the next morning as if they came down with the meteors. Their long, slender stems dipped in trichomes balance several flower heads of varying numbers—some hold three, others five, or seven, but the number is always odd. They share a passing resemblance to dandelions, but their centers are too deep an orange, bleeding into crimson on the edges. Little clusters of exploding stars. They remind her of firewheels, perhaps sharing an order or a family, but the name is appropriate here too. And yet, the firewheels of her past had always brought her comfort. These, whatever they are, do not.

Otherworldly, she thinks as she inspects one closer. He catches her on her hands and knees in the grass with her face buried in a bloom, shattering her trance with a gentle laugh. When she looks up to meet him, he sheepishly presents her with a bouquet of nearly fifty of them.

“How was it?” she asks, pulling herself up to reluctantly accept his gift. Her gut screams at her to refuse it, which she ignores. They’re only flowers. And then, when the bouquet is in her hands, her gut demands she drop them. She ignores this plea as well, her face scrunching at the disconnect between her instinct and her actions.

“Transcendent,” he says, and there is a vastness in his tone that takes her breath away.

* * *

Several autumns ago, she’d dragged him out to Big Bend National Park, one of the few places left in the continental US untouched by light pollution, under the promise of stars. It was an eight-hour drive from the city, and they’d stopped to get gas at every major junction along the way—the land out there felt wild, and though it had given her an electric thrill, the thought of getting stranded out there terrified her.

When they passed a car along the side of the road somewhere deep on I-10 with smoke pouring out from under the hood, they didn’t slow down.

“Should we—” he’d started, at the same time she’d said, “I’ve seen that horror movie.”

They kept driving.

They pulled into the park’s boundaries as the sun was setting. Straight ahead, suspended low in the sky, was Venus, so bright and so foreign that they both wondered privately if it was a UFO.

“What is that?” she’d asked him, laughing nervously to cover the awesome fear that worms its way into human hearts at the sight of the unknown. Only later, at the park’s headquarters, were they able to identify it.

“Venus, the diamond in the sky,” the plaque read. It became a funny story to tell later, a footnote in their lives about the feral beauty of nature and how little they understood it.

She’s never forgotten how it felt to be humbled in the presence of the universe, and here, their celestial neighbors are just as dazzling. Even if she wanted to, they would be impossible to ignore.

* * *

The black spots don’t announce their arrival. She first notices one in the shower on an early October morning. It’s a dark fleck staining the white ceramic basin beside her left foot, so small that it could have been there for weeks. Curiously, she tries to brush it toward the drain with her big toe, but instead of careening down the drain never to be thought about again, it smears against the bottom of the tub into a dark, ugly trail. The effect is startling, like mascara that falls from an eyelash to a cheek, and she decides that’s what it is. No matter that she can’t remember the last time she wore any. What else could it be? After she finishes washing her hair, she turns off the water and scrubs the tub clean before going about her day. It slips from her mind entirely, until a few days later, when she returns to the shower to find a handful of new spots.

Dirt, she reasons, is the culprit this time. Her knees and palms were black with it after a morning of clearing weeds from the garden beds in preparation for winter. But as she stares down at the dark constellation against the white, her stomach swims with dread.

* * *

Mold. It was mold from inside the drain that was somehow getting pushed up into the tub. Or mold in the shower head that was raining down on her. Disgusting, but solvable. At her request, he snakes the pipes clean. He replaces the shower head.

And then a spot appears in a mixing bowl in the kitchen. Another appears on their bedroom ceiling. Whatever the source, it’s no longer limited to the bathroom.

* * *

The dream-her saw potential in the house. She still hears herself selling it to him—It’s not perfect, but it’s got good bones! It’s stood here for 170 years already, and now it could be ours to shape. Isn’t that beautiful? She’d been thinking of the new condos and apartments popping up all over the city, carbon-copies of one another, demolishing its spirit to make room for their insatiable, white-washed sprawl. But this place? It has a soul. It has history. It’s special, with its post and beam interior, red-brick facade, and original 1800s wide-plank flooring. And they could be its dutiful stewards, mere guardians, until the time comes, decades from now, for them to pass it onto another young couple seeking refuge.

And he agreed, like he always does.

“It’s kind of hard to see.” He’d chewed on his bottom lip when he said it, and she braced herself for the no. “But if anyone can pull it off, we can.”

What he didn’t need to say was I trust you.

But now, with mortgage payments that swallow an entire paycheck whole, she only sees projects. The boiler goes out, thankfully before the temperatures drop too low. The ugly laminate flooring in the bathroom hides decaying wood floorboards beneath. The leaves of the apple trees, on closer inspection, are mottled with a blight they don’t know how to manage, and although she’s not seen any mice, droppings announce their staggering numbers. Her eyes become magnifying glasses, documenting and cataloguing each flaw she’d previously been blind to, and every time something new gets added to her mental checklist she wonders what she’s truly done to earn that trust in the first place.

Their only recourse to the growing list of problems, their surplus of money which had previously seemed bottomless, is gone.

* * *

She reflects on the barren appearance of the trees outside her windows, of the emptiness of her womb. Stick Season, the locals call it, a twilight period between the end of autumn and winter proper. When the forest has dropped its glorious dresses of red, orange, and yellows but has yet to don its cloak of snow. She supposes this natural mirroring should bring her comfort, that in a few months, the ground will swell with new life. That such a thing is possible for her, too. But all it does is make the loneliness inside her curdle into something far fouler.

There was a time before, even when they were drowning in deadlines, that he, her seismometer, would have been able to look at the chart of her growing despair and warn her that she was about to fall into the abyss. But this time, he says nothing, and so she retreats further and further until one day, her period is late. She swaps two blue lines for two pink ones, and though it’s everything she thought she wanted, all she feels is the vague awareness that she should be happy.

That she should feel something, anything, when he scoops her up into his arms and spins her around the bathroom.

“We’re going to be parents!” he beams, his smile a lighthouse that draws her outside of herself just long enough for her to return it. When he pulls her into an embrace, warm and deep, she revels in how strong his arms are, how he could crush her if he wanted to though he never would, how even though they’ve been distant, he’ll always protect them. Them. No longer two, but three.

And then, in the mirror, she sees them on the back of his neck: a trio of little black spots, dark as moles, black as sin.

* * *

He’s different, she tells herself.

You’re lonely, she counters, though what she means is depressed. At the start of winter, in a new state with no friends and morning sickness that spans all hours of the day, she’s inventing monsters where there are none. He dotes on her, running out to the store daily to make whatever meal won’t turn her stomach sour that night. He rubs her shoulders and massages her feet, though swelling is still a future worry. He draws her baths and, on occasion, pours her a tiny glass of red wine to take the edge off.

“A small occasional sip won’t hurt,” he winks, and although she never thought she’d be the type, she drinks the liquid down, reveling in the heat that blooms in her throat, in her stomach, in its wake. She relishes the momentary distractions, the few times she allows herself to enjoy his kindness without mentally eviscerating him.

He’s spending a lot of time outside.

So what? We moved here to spend time outside.

The cat’s been avoiding him.

That’s only your imagination.

Those spots…

Enough!

The intrusive thoughts are merely a distraction from a more painful truth. That the only broken thing in the house is her.

* * *

Long after they’ve withered on the stems and returned to the earth, the flowers continue to appear to her in dreams. Their delicate stalks twist around her legs, her arms, with those supernova blooms erupting along their lengths. The dreams always end the same way—with her throat encircled in that constricting green and petals spilling from her lips as she chokes for air.

You were right, they tease her.

Their voices contain infinities.

* * *

Dead mice begin to appear around the house. At first, she welcomes the development, grateful that the cat has finally rediscovered his natural instincts. In the mornings, she wakes to find their little bodies scattered around the floors. They’re battered, but whole, and she collects them in a dustpan before depositing them on the forest’s boundary where they sink into the fresh snow like stones.

And then, one day, the mice become mutilations. Heads are separated from necks and entrails spill onto the wood, leaving dark stains in their wake. She pays more attention to the cat, listening for the sound of his frantic footfalls in pursuit of his prey, but she never hears it. She searches his fur for signs of blood, but there isn’t any.

In the pre-dawn hours of Christmas morning, she steps out of bed into a warm, wet squish. The tiny bones that survived a brutal death crunch beneath her feet. She heads straight for the bathroom, leaving bloody footprints in her wake. Only when the shower is running hot does she break down, crying hard, ugly tears into the drain. Tears for the despair she can’t seem to shake, tears for the regret that’s starting to bloom in her gut. She won’t let herself wonder if she’s made a mistake, and so the unspoken question is left to fester.

The bodies, bloody little offerings, continue to appear every morning, always on her side of the bed. It shocks her, really, how quickly she becomes accustomed to the gore.

* * *

One night, after the turning of the year, he drags her outside to look at the sky. The moon is dark, and the sky is so big, so heavy with stars, that she worries it might crush her beneath it. Thousands of distant suns, all twinkling like spider eyes in the grass, bear down upon her. She grabs his arm for support.

“Can you feel it?” he whispers, his voice warped and theatrical. It’s meant to be a joke, a quote spoken by some eldritch horror in a low budget movie she’d made him watch earlier last winter. But beneath the vault of galaxies, the question isn’t funny. It carries with it the weight of the worlds above.

She can.

* * *

Their bellies swell in tandem.

“I really let myself go,” he says, a hand trailing over his new girth. Though his face wears a smile, she can see the embarrassment barely veiled beneath it. Is it true? And even if it was, how does the normal holiday gorging explain the fact that the arc of his stomach perfectly mirrors hers?

He takes to sleeping in t-shirts, something he’s never done before. One morning, in the early light of dawn, she lifts his tee just enough to see the soft pink flesh beneath. He snaps awake, forcing the shirt down just as she catches something slithering beneath the skin, deeper into muscle, the perfect outline of a stem and flower. But as quickly as she spots it, it’s obscured by cotton, and he’s sitting up to pull away from her.

“What was that?” she demands.

“What was what?” he asks, irritation laced between the words.

She doesn’t answer him, instead diving back for the hem to once again expose that rounded belly. Only this time, the skin is smooth, absent of any mysterious protrusions. “I saw—”

“Christ,” he snaps, pulling himself out of the bed. His cheeks are flushed red. She’s embarrassed him. “How would you feel if I poked and prodded at you?”

“I’m sorry—”

He’s silent as he stomps out into the hallway. A few moments later, she hears the padding of his feet on the treadmill from the spare room.

* * *

Her old friends are worried.

“Have you met anyone?”

It’s the polite way of saying, “You seem dangerously isolated.”

“Driving makes me nervous. With the baby. I’m not used to the snow, and we live on a dirt road.”

“You’re shy,” they press. “Just rip off the band-aid. Get out of the house.”

“Okay,” she says. “You’re right.” But what she means is, “There’s nowhere to go.”

* * *

She engulfs herself in plans for spring, mapping out and cataloguing the entire garden. She orders the seeds while snow still covers the ground, and he helps her meticulously plant them in the black cell pack trays. Thai chiles, kale, green onions, basil, peppers, and a whole slew of tomatoes. Her personal favorite, the Berkeley tie-dyes, are more purple than red. The seedlings all erupt from the soil with surprising ease, but as winter turns to early spring, inexplicably, every single variety begins to die.

* * *

Their stomachs keep growing.

“Do you think it’s a tumor?” she whispers to him in the dark.

“Everything is fine,” he whispers back. “But if you’re really worried, we’ll call the doctor tomorrow.”

* * *

They run tests. They do scans. All the results come back normal. Nothing in his charts explains his swollen stomach.

“Our best guess is couvade syndrome,” the doctor explains. “A sympathetic pregnancy. It’s psychological, most likely nothing to be alarmed about.”

“That really happens?” she asks, alarmed despite the doctor’s words.

“Not often, no,” the doctor admits. “But his blood work looks great. The CT scan showed no abnormalities. All the cancer screenings came back negative. We’re down to the cause being psychosomatic.”

“See,” he says, his voice too chipper. “I told you it was nothing to worry about. Just stress, nothing more.”

She ignores them both. How could there be nothing to worry about, when he carries a ghost in his gut? One that slithers beneath the skin. “So there’s no tumor?” she asks again, finding herself wishing that there was.

“No tumor,” the doctor repeats.

A sympathetic pregnancy.

Then why is parasitic the word that comes to mind?

* * *

She transplants the few stragglers in the garden as early as the forecast allows, but the plants didn’t develop their root systems. What does it mean, she wonders, that they appeared perfect and healthy from above only to mask a devastating rot below?

* * *

The nursery is classic and beautiful, exactly what the dream-her envisioned. It will photograph well, and some day, they’ll look back on pictures from these early days fondly.

The oak furniture really was the right call.

It went so well with the dark green walls.

It was perfect, wasn’t it?

They won’t remember the skunks that nested beneath their back porch, the wolf spiders lurking in the shadows of the outbuildings, or the mysterious bloom of flies that erupted in the fieldstone basement like a Biblical plague, seemingly without a source.

She’s excited for that. When this house makes her feel anything other than dread.

* * *

As his stomach grows bigger, she grows to resent him. Now, whenever she looks down upon her own pregnant swell, all she sees is its hideous twin.

* * *

The fantasy of an escape begins to pick at her. Her parents are the best option—they would let her stay with them, but not without questions, and after she’s answered them, she’d be rewarded with their smug expressions. Twice now, she’s found herself thumbing through her contacts, but she can’t see the words MOM CELL without also seeing those fucking smiles—small upturns at the corner of their lips, not enough to openly mock her but enough to say “we were right.”

“Are you sure?” they’d asked her, over and over again, when she’d told them of the little farmhouse. “It will be a lot to handle.”

She refuses to give them the satisfaction.

* * *

Her bladder wakes her for the third time, but this time when she groans back into consciousness, the space beside her is empty. She takes a breath before throwing her legs off the bed. When she stands, she sways with the weight of new life inside her. The bathroom’s call is urgent, so she tends to it first. But after she relieves herself, she pads out into the hallway and listens. A soft glow in the direction of the kitchen illuminates the otherwise darkling hall, just enough that she can make her way toward the sounds of glass clinking and rummaging. And then, silence.

A midnight snack, she thinks, nothing to worry about. And yet some primal force draws her to the doorway, keeping her feet firmly rooted in shadow.

He’s there, in the middle of the kitchen, standing over the island. The refrigerator door is wide open behind him, the source of the low light. Before him, still on its Styrofoam platter, is a pound of ground beef. Her stomach sinks as he removes the plastic, and she waits for him to turn to the stove, to oil the grill pan. But he doesn’t.

He takes a handful of the ground in his fingers and stares at it for a moment. She holds her breath, mentally willing him to ball it up, to form a patty, to turn toward the stove. Please, she thinks, please. And then he’s bringing the meat to his lips. He’s tentative at first, probing the sickly pink flesh with his tongue, but the taste must please him because then he’s devouring the package in handfuls. Chunks fall back to the island in his haste, and ice floods her veins as he leans down to lick them from the linoleum.

She watches in silence, listening to him grind the raw tendons between his teeth. Teeth not meant to cut muscle. Only when he turns back to the fridge and withdraws a chicken breast marked for tomorrow’s lunch does she turn around and tip-toe back to bed.

When he joins her again, she can smell the coppery tang of blood on his breath.

* * *

“What were you doing last night?”

“What do you mean?” His smile fades as he watches her pour another cup of coffee. “Hey, isn’t that your third cup?”

Her nerves are fraught, and she slams the mug down on the counter. “I don’t need you to monitor my caffeine consumption. And we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about your midnight snacking.”

His expression is blank. “What do you mean?”

As she stares at the face she’s had nearly a decade to memorize, something breaks inside of her. There are none of the usual indicators that he’s lying—he holds her gaze. He doesn’t clear his throat. He’s not shuffling back and forth on his feet. She barrels past him to the fridge and throws it open. There, gleaming in its plastic wrapping, is a pound of ground beef. Beside it, a chicken breast.

“What are you playing at?” she growls.

“Do you need to lie down?”

“I know what I saw!”

“And what, exactly, was that?” There’s a taunting edge to his voice, as innocuous as a paper’s edge, but it still cuts her.

She stumbles back, certain his tone contains the proof she needs, the subtle admission to everything she’s witnessed. Suddenly, the kitchen is too hot. Sweat beads on the back of her neck, and she throws up her hands, defeated. “I need some air. I’m going out.”

He doesn’t ask her to stay.

* * *

She returns after dinner, coaxed back home by logic. It was a night terror of some kind. What would the alternative be? That he’s running a conspiracy that requires him to sneak out of bed before dawn to restock the fridge? And to what end?

To make you think you’re crazy.

Stop it!

The sun is well into its descent for the evening, and she has about a half hour left before it sinks beneath the hills. The long shadows of the trees are encroaching on that soft pink light, and they’ll blanket the hill entirely soon enough.

A package sits on their doorstep. It looks so painfully normal, like a relic from an old life. She scoops it up under her arm and heads to the kitchen, rifling through the drawer where she keeps the box cutter. Three quick slices through the masking tape, and she’s in. Tucked inside, beneath a layer of tissue paper, is a knitted baby blanket. She brings it to her nose and inhales deeply. It smells vaguely like a barn in the spring, of sweet cut hay and baby animals and fresh milk.

“You’re back.” His voice floats into the kitchen from behind her.

For a second, she imagines storming out of the house again, only this time not returning. The house that was her foolish dream and has somehow become a mausoleum. To the mice, to the plants, to their relationship. What else will this tomb claim, before it’s all said and done? But instead, she forces herself to turn around and look at him, digging deep inside herself to apologize for her outburst. It’s the hormones, she’ll say. I’m sorry.

It takes her a few startling minutes to make sense of what she’s seeing. The entire left side of his face is covered in black spots. They careen down his neck beneath his white t-shirt. His engorged stomach strains the already thin fabric taut, and beneath it, the skin is marred by larger dark circles. Her fingers wrap tightly around the box cutter, still clutched in her grasp along with the blanket.

“Stay back,” she warns, lifting a hand to put some distance between them.

“What’s gotten into you today?” he asks, but his voice is a sneer, and now she knows for certain that his body is housing something sinister.

“I told you to stay back!”

“Or what?”

She grabs the blanket’s empty box from the table where she placed it and sends it soaring into his face. It’s not enough to hurt him, but it buys her the time to dart out onto the back porch from the opposite side of the kitchen. The screen door slams closed behind her, but she hears it creak back open as he follows. She runs, slowed by the weight of their child, up that same hill from which he watched the Perseids nearly a year ago. In minutes, he’ll be on her. She can’t out-pace him.

The thought sends a jolt of adrenaline through her limbs, and she snaps out the box cutter’s safety with her right thumb, letting as many razors out as will fall to give her some semblance of a blade. And then, with the blanket still in her left hand, she whirls around on her heels to face him, tossing the knitted throw over his face and slashing across his stomach with her right.

“What the hell!” he growls in pain, pawing desperately to throw the blanket onto the ground. The cut isn’t deep, but it was enough to leave a sharp, thin line of red in its wake. The stain blooms on his shirt. He lunges for her, and she plants her feet into the ground to try to stabilize herself for the blow, but he’s too big. With one, swift motion, he’s on top of her, and so she does the only thing she can: she sinks the entirety of the box cutter’s blade into that bloated, roiling gut.

He screams, sitting up to inspect the damage. Something snakes beneath his skin, visible below the taut fabric of his shirt, and any terror she feels is suddenly replaced by fury, by the need to protect their child. Her child. She grabs a hold of the box cutter with both hands and throws her body to the right. The blade is sharp, but it still requires the full force of her weight to tear through his stomach. Only after the gaping hole appears does she realize she’s shrieking, too.

But now he is eerily silent. When she finally has the courage to look up to his face, she finds him staring wide-eyed at the wound. Except his eyes aren’t his anymore—they’re entirely black, the same color as the dark between the stars.

“Ben?” His name is a prayer with a foul answer.

His mouth falls open and a low wail escapes, and though she recognizes the voice, it’s not his. It’s the flowers and their infinities, and when he reaches his hand to touch the slash in his gut, she knows what’s coming. She tries to slither out from underneath him, and the movement is enough to draw his attention back to her. His thighs squeeze closed around her, and the pressure of his muscles contracting is enough to force the flowers from his gut cavity. Hundreds of them, stems and all, each covered in blood, spill onto her chest.

Her fingers claw at the dirt, but it’s no use. He smiles down upon her, and then thousands of black spots are wafting from the flower’s centers, dark spores that fill her nostrils and her open mouth and she know that she should hold her breath, that they’ll make her sick, that they’ll infect her, but she can’t stop and so she screams, and screams, and screams. Only then does he relax, his body slumping forward onto hers.

She keeps howling into the twilight sky over his slackened shoulder, already the color of wine spilling into indigo. One by one, the stars blink on above her. And then, one falls.

And another.

And another.

Transcendent.

End.

Shannon Ives graduated with honors from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in Latin with a focus on myth, religion, and magic. She currently calls the Green Mountain State her home, where she writes on the edge of the deep, dark woods about wayward women and monsters. She is represented by John Baker at Bell Lomax Moreton.

Phase Ball

By Rik Hoskin

The end of civilization started with a child’s toy.

For me, it started when my sister gave my son one of those toys as a gift. William was three-and-a-half then, bumbling and curious, giggling about stuff that as grown ups we’ll never understand.

My sister, Hailey, had arrived on one of her frequent Sunday visits just before lunch. It was a sunny day but there was still that chill in the air where winter won’t quite make way for spring. William loved his Auntie Hailey. Why wouldn’t he? She didn’t have kids of her own so she spoilt him rotten every time she came over. This visit she had brought him a phase ball—the very latest thing, she said—and William couldn’t get out of her hugging arms fast enough to go play with it.

“Jane got one of these for Belle last week and she absolutely adores it,” Hailey told me as William ran across the wooden floor of our lounge, rolling the ball before him. The ball was a foot high and came up almost to William’s knee. We stood watching him play for a while as we caught up on the lives of mutual friends. Hailey was smoking again, which annoyed me—I’d quit three years ago, just after William was born, in fact, and it still required a great amount of willpower not to join Hailey as she stood on our apartment’s balcony lighting up.

I didn’t know anything about the phase balls then. They were still new—this was before they had started running the news stories, and long before things had started to fall apart. It was typical of my sister to be ahead of the curve. And I don’t blame her for what happened with William. I can’t. It’s not like it only happened to us.

Sam joined us for lunch, and she indulged William when he showed her what his fantastic Auntie Hailey had brought.

“He already has, I don’t know, fifty balls,” Sam said once William had gone back to his game. Sam had never liked Hailey. Okay, that’s not true—she didn’t dislike her, it was just that there had always been this kind of one-upmanship between them so that nothing the other did was ever going to be good enough. Hailey ignored her.

“He looks pleased with it,” Hailey said. And he did.

Our apartment was modern, which was another way of saying they didn’t bother with walls unless they had to, so we could sit at the dining table and still watch William play in the lounge. It was then that I first noticed something odd about the ball. It seemed to be disappearing when it left the floor. One moment it was there, the next it was gone, and then it was there again.

“What is that?” I asked as I watched William play.

Samantha and Hailey stared at me. In my surprise, I’d apparently butted right into some heated conversation concerning the wretched hair styles of female politicians (no, seriously). I pointed at the ball and asked again.

“Is it me or does that ball keep... disappearing?”

Hailey nodded. “That’s exactly what it does,” she said. “It’s the latest thing. A phase ball. It phases in and out of the visible spectrum, tricking the eyes that it’s disappeared.”

“Wow,” I said. I was dumbfounded.

I watched for a while as William rolled and bounced the phase ball around the lounge. Some of the time it looked like William was playing with an imaginary toy because there was nothing there, at least as far as I could see. One time he got a little close to the sideboard, and Sam reminded him to play elsewhere, but William didn’t mind. In fact, he barely glanced up from his play.

After a while, I had to look away. It was hypnotic, watching that ball appear and disappear like that, without any discernible pattern to its phases. But it was giving me a headache. I wear glasses to correct short-sightedness, and I get a migraine when I try to watch 3D films. I guess the phase ball had a similar effect. But Sam seemed to like it, which was a miracle—had to be the first present that Hailey had ever brought for William that Sam actually approved of.

* * *

William played with the phase ball pretty much non-stop after that. It was his go-to toy in the morning and it was the thing he brought to the dinner table when it was time to stop playing and eat. He even took it to bed, and I’d peek in on him during the commercial breaks and see him fast asleep, still hugging his phase ball close to his chest.

William was so focused on the phase ball that after a week Sam started to worry. “Have you seen Will play with anything other than that ball?” she asked me one night after William had gone to bed.

I shrugged. “Kids have their favorite toys,” I told her. “I used to love those little green army men, I had a whole crate of them and I’d spend hours setting them up for a toy war.”

Sam wrinkled her nose. “I guess.”

“I had a ‘blanky’ until I was six,” I added.

“You baby! That’s so sad,” Sam teased.

“I was six, not twenty-six.”

In his room, William slept on, hugging the best toy he had ever been given.

* * *

Three weeks later, Sam came back from a training course in a buoyant mood. Back then, she was something important in accounting for one of the big multinational companies that shut down when the end came.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked when she came bounding through the apartment door. It wasn’t like Sam to be happy after a training day, she usually cursed them as a waste of time and resources.

“You’ll never guess what happened,” Sam began. “We were put into teams to solve some problems—”

“Sounds ghastly,” I muttered.

Sam shot me a look before reaching into her bag. “At the end we were all given a prize. Look!”

From her bag, Sam produced a ball. It was smaller than William’s, about the size of a pool cue ball, but it had that same greyish-pink tint to it.

“What is that?” I asked. “Is that a...?”

Sam nodded, bouncing the ball on our wooden floor. We both watched in awe as the ball phased in and out of the visible spectrum, disappearing and reappearing before our eyes.

“William is going to want it,” I said.

“He can’t have it,” Sam said. “It’s my prize.” She was joking, I assumed.

* * *

Sometimes, Sam brought work home, so we’d set up a small desk in the bedroom, where she could close the door and get on with things on her laptop without being bothered. Her desk was never untidy as such, but she always seemed to have twice as many papers as the desk could comfortably house. I noticed her prize phase ball sitting atop a tower of loose papers a few days later, where she had unpacked her bag after the training day. It sat there, unobtrusive and solid enough now that no one was touching it. If you stared at it for a long time, you could kind of see it flickering a little, like a leaf catching the breeze, but it only winked out of sight if you handled it. I ignored it and got back to making the bed.

William was still enamored with his own ball, of course. It had been three weeks since Hailey had brought it, yet he remained transfixed by it, playing almost non-stop with the thing in our apartment and taking it with him whenever we went out. We didn’t mind—the ball kept him happy and he was never any trouble so long as he had it to hand.

* * *

One Thursday night, Sam got back from work with a pile of paperwork. “I have to do this for tomorrow,” she told me before shutting herself in the bedroom.

Sam skipped dinner and so William and I ate by ourselves. William, as had become normal by then, had his phase ball with him at the table and he would roll it back and forth between forkfuls of pasta never taking his eyes off it. I didn’t pay much attention—I got a headache if I watched it for too long, so I’d got used to just kind of zoning it out.

Later that evening, I checked in on Sam and asked if she wanted a snack. She was sitting at the little desk in the corner of our bedroom, staring at the smaller phase ball that she had been given at her training day the week before. Her laptop screen was dark and her bag was on the bed. The bag was open and I could see the urgent paperwork sitting inside.

“All finished?” I asked.

Sam didn’t answer at first, and I had to ask again before she murmured a response.

“You work too hard,” I said as I stood behind her, massaging her shoulders. “Call it a night. Anything you didn’t get done now will have to wait.”

“Yeah,” Sam replied, but her eyes were still locked on the phase ball as she rolled it across the only uncluttered six inches of the desk.

I went back out to the kitchen to put on the kettle and rustle up some toast.

The kettle had been boiled twenty minutes before I checked on Sam again. She was sitting at her desk just the same as before, gazing transfixed at the phase ball.

“Kettle’s boiled,” I told her.

Sam ignored me, her eyes still locked on that weird ball as it slipped in and out of the visible spectrum. I went over and took the ball from her hand, helping her out of the chair.

“Come on,” I said. “Have a hot drink and think about getting ready for bed.”

“Sure,” she muttered with a shake of her head.

She came out of the bedroom in a kind of half-asleep trance. I figured she’d been working too hard.

It wasn’t until later that I found out that she hadn’t switched on the computer that night, and that the paperwork had never left her bag.

* * *

After that, Samantha would spend a lot of time in the bedroom playing with the phase ball. She would sit at her desk or on the floor, rolling it back and forth, just watching the way it seemed to slip out of existence, as if lost between the sheets on the bed.

I tried talking to her, but she was unresponsive. One time I hid the ball while she was at work, but when she came home she turned the bedroom upside down until she found it. There was no reasoning with her. She wasn’t eating much anymore, nor sleeping. She was looking tired. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find her sitting at the desk, rolling her phase ball back and forth, only just visible from the light that seeped in from where we left the door ajar to listen for William.

William too was lost in his own little world, bouncing the ball that my sister had given him, rolling it and watching as it disappeared and reappeared, over and over. When I tried taking his away, he would cry, non-stop, until I gave it back.

“I want ball, daddy. I want ball.”

I can still hear the whine in his voice, even now.

* * *

One evening, I was watching the television news. I was alone, of course; Sam was in the bedroom and William was sitting under the dining table playing with his own ball. He’d figured out that I couldn’t reach him so easily there, which meant I wouldn’t try to take it away again. A reporter appeared on the television talking about the way the phase ball had conquered the toy market. They were talking about it being the number one best-seller for Christmas, which was still six months away, and how sales kept growing.

“Market analysts tell us that enough phase balls have been sold to account for one for every household in the country, and many households have two or three,” the reporter explained as, behind him, some kids in a school gymnasium bounced the strange balls in time. The kids were leaned over, kind of like hunchbacks, watching the way the balls flickered in and out of reality, visible for an instant before slipping out of sight.

“And it’s not just here. The toy is the top seller right across the globe. From Paris to Peking, London to Luxembourg, the phase ball has conquered the toy market and it seems its fans can’t get enough.” Footage of people playing phase ball outside various international landmarks accompanied this statement, before the camera cut back to the school gym where those kids were still bouncing their balls.

The reporter made it sound like fun, but as I watched those kids, bent over themselves as if they all had osteoporosis, I felt unnerved. It was eerie, the way they had become transfixed.

The reporter signed off, and I sat there thinking about Hailey, and how she had always been ahead of the trends.

* * *

The day after the news report, Samantha didn’t go into work. Instead, she sat at her desk rolling her phase ball to and fro, and when I spoke to her she ignored me, swatting me away the way she’d swat a fly.

William too was playing with his phase ball. He hadn’t stopped playing with it since he’d first got it six weeks ago.

I knew about addiction. I’d been a smoker for eight years and quitting had been the hardest thing I’d ever put myself through. It was still hard sometimes: when the weather turned cold; when I drank. My wife and my little man had become obsessed with their phase balls, and they fed that addiction by playing with them all day long, to the exclusion of everything else.

And it wasn’t just them. Reports were surfacing in the news about people dying in their homes because they hadn’t eaten in weeks. A bus crashed in the city and it emerged that the driver hadn’t slept in a month because he’d spent his nights playing with his kid’s phase ball. At first these reports were small, nothing more than filler, and sometimes the phase ball connection wasn’t even mentioned. Why would it be? The things were so common it would have been like stating, “this person had a watch,” and trying to make that sound like it had caused their death.

But medical professionals were starting to notice the connection, and they were getting worried. Not all of them, of course—at least a third of them were so addicted to their own phase ball that they had stopped coming in to work, and I once heard somewhere that 95 percent of all medical professionals had a phase ball they used to relieve stress. The things were addictive.

* * *

I don’t know when society really fell apart. It wasn’t like in the movies, it was more gradual than that. A train wouldn’t arrive, or a delivery got missed at the supermarket, those kinds of things. Then stores started to close down, or just stopped opening because the staff were too busy playing phase ball at home, and the customers weren’t coming anymore. Even toy stores, which was ironic given the upswing in trade that the phase ball had brought them. And it wasn’t just here—all over the world, cities were grinding to a halt, street by street, office block by office block, person by person.

I’d lost my wife by then. Her hair was matted and unwashed, and she smelled of body odor, but she didn’t care. She just sat playing with the ball. She wouldn’t eat unless I forced her, and she never spoke; I don’t think she remembered how.

William had become so withdrawn that he barely interacted with us. As with Sam, I fed him, but we didn’t communicate. He had been a bright boy six months ago, perennially happy and full of energy. Now he barely moved, just sat rolling his phase ball against the wall so that it would roll back, winking in and out of sight. I couldn’t take it away. When I did, he’d just shut down, staring into space. At least with the ball he had something to do, something to occupy his mind. Still, I felt like I’d failed him. Because I had.

* * *

One night I awoke to the smell of burning. Sam was sitting at her desk, rolling the phase ball back and forth the way she always did now. I ignored her and went to the window, opening the blinds.

There was a fire out there, blocks away, glowing like someone had boxed sunset. It burned in silence, no traffic, no sirens, no shouting.

I called the emergency services. It rang for maybe six minutes before someone eventually picked up. “I need to report a fire,” I said, still watching through the bedroom window.

At the other end of the line, no one said anything. I could hear breathing, so I knew they were there. And I could hear something else too, the familiar sound of bouncing, a phase ball striking a desk.

I tried again but the phone just rang and rang so I hung up, went back to bed and tried to sleep.

The next day, fires burned throughout the city, sending black plumes of smoke into the sky. I watched from the communal balcony of my apartment block, trying to judge if they were getting closer. I was the only one who watched from there. I guess everyone else had shut themselves inside to play ball.

I could see a few people moving about in the streets; not many, just lone wanderers making their way through the city, getting away from the flames. One man had a phase ball the size of a basketball which he bounced along the sidewalk as he walked past the burning store on the corner of our street. He didn’t look up.

* * *

My eyesight spared me. My terrible, sit-at-the-front-of-class-and-get-picked-on eyesight. I say spared, I don’t say saved. I’d never say saved. I’m not saved.

My eyesight forced me to watch my wife and my boy die, until I couldn’t bear to watch it anymore. There was hardly any food by then, the stores had been stripped and no more deliveries ever came, but even if there had been food neither Sam nor William could be enticed to eat. They remained transfixed by those balls as they rolled and bounced in their hands. Roll and bounce, roll and bounce.

It broke my heart. I had to leave them in the end, but I knew that, in any practical sense, they had already left me a long time before. Their heads were locked somewhere in those phases between the visible, just before the curtain parts, anticipating the reveal.

I heard a theory that the phase balls had come to Earth from somewhere else, an alien virus that spread through whatever means it found on a host planet, replicating over and over. With us, it found commercialism, capitalism, product acquisition, and it had spread that way, taking over, creating an all-consuming fascination with it that could never be satiated. It tickled the eyes with its one trick, a trick that never became stale. Maybe there were other ways. Maybe in a few years it will come again in another form, one we’re all susceptible to. Because they say a virus doesn’t kill every host—it always leaves some so that it can spread again.

End.

Rik Hoskin is a multi-award winning writer of novels, graphic novels, video games and animation. He’s written comics for Star Wars, Superman, Doctor Who and various other properties. He won the Dragon Award for Best Graphic Novel 2018 for White Sand (with Brandon Sanderson), which also made the New York Times Bestseller list, and the Indie Volt for Best Graphic Novel 2021 for the crowdfunded Only Death Can Save Us. He’s written SF novels under his own name and as “James Axler”. His most recent novel was Bystander 27, published by Angry Robot.

He’s also written video games, including as lead writer, and has written animation for BBC television in the UK.

Marianne

By Scott J. Moses

Liphart watched as the soldier he knew only as Benson vomited at the edge of the sprawling field. The tips of the wheat glistened gold in the French summer’s sun. The craters from some long-loosed mortar barrage peppered the farm in foxholed divots. A would-be paradise tainted by that oldest of bastards: war.

Get me home, Lord, Liphart prayed, shielding his eyes from the sunlight seeping through his fingers. Use me, a humble tool for Your purpose.

Benson rose with a groan, wiped the vomit from his lips. “Those airsickness pills,” he said, hunching over again. “Not agreeing with me…”

The rustling field drew Liphart’s gaze, sent his mind elsewhere.

Tall Virginian grass blew in a rasp near the forest. An injured doe disappeared into the thick pines. His father swore and, towering over him in the blue haze of that cool morning, yanked the rifle from Liphart’s trembling hands. “Come on, mister good for nothin’,” he said, the thigh-high grass parting with his father’s form. “Goddammit, boy. If you’d just put her down clean, like I told you…” Liphart—seven years old, tears welling in his eyes, snot running from his raw nostrils—looked up at his father. A whine threaded his voice.

“I can’t find it, Pa,” he said as his chafed, bare hands sifted through the medley of damp forest floor. “I can’t!”

His father turned, glaring, and Liphart’s breath stuck in his iced-over lungs. “I don’t wanna see you without that shell in your hand, hear?” His father made for the tree line, his voice retreating, though loud on the wind. “We carry our mistakes, boy.”

Liphart cried and sniffed snot into his burning lungs. His hands combed through the wood chips and leaves, panning for the lost shell.

Benson lurched to his feet, and the movement pulled Liphart from the memory. From the lone farmhouse up the dirt road beyond the dipped chicken wire fence walked a German soldier. Liphart lifted his rifle to his eye, heart slamming in his chest. Not deserted after all, he thought, though beneath the long German’s greatcoat, he could make out the contours of a US Army uniform. The helmet they all wore on his head. The M1 Garand they all carried slung behind him. Benson had his rifle trained now, pulled the bolt back.

“It’s the kid,” Liphart said, lowering his weapon. “In Kraut gear.” Benson sighed and upended his rifle, eyes stuck to the approaching man—or boy. Probably can’t even order a beer, Liphart thought as the kid shambled to them on the barren road. But here he is. Here we are.

“Hell of a way to get killed!” Benson yelled through his cupped hand. Liphart smirked at the irony. So is volunteering to jump into German-occupied France. So is standing in the open road, yelling in English. If there were Germans here, they’d moved on. The absence of cracking gunfire punching holes into them, or their severed limbs floating atop the smoke and dirt of mortar blasts, was proof enough.

The kid, Private Morner, removed a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, the German greatcoat flapping with his strides. He took one in his mouth, removed his lighter with trembling hands. “Y’all should see,” Morner said in that southern drawl Liphart couldn’t quite place.

“What is it?” Liphart asked, and looked past him to the farmhouse pocked with dirt and shrapnel. The stones at its base ashen-black from a long-quelled flame.

“I don’t know,” Morner said, flicking the lighter alive. “You’ll have to tell me.”

* * *

A table slid before the house’s entrance bore a bowl of rank soup swarmed with flies, their buzzing a fervor within the confines of the stone echo-chamber. Morner’s lips grew tight around his cigarette, and he pointed to the floorboards nearest the door. Liphart paused, sidestepping the long streak of purple-maroon littered with bullet casings. Benson crouched low, his eyes following the smeared crimson through the open doorway.

“I didn’t see it at first,” Morner said, eyes stuck to the floor. “Went right for the Nazi spoils near the bed there.” Liphart gave it a cursory glance. A thin-mattressed bed on a metal frame in the room’s corner. A lighter, pencil, hammer, chisel, a photograph of a smiling woman—all meticulously lined on the nearby windowsill. A blood-specked gray button-up spread out on the floor. Two boots at the foot of the bed, one upright, one collapsed. “Wasn’t ’til I pulled the coat on that I saw it,” Morner said.

Before Liphart could ask, Morner nudged the farmhouse door shut with the barrel of his rifle. The wood was coated in jagged, crystalized purple, like sap had burst from a tree and still clung to it. It shimmered in the sunlight let in through the nearby window. Morner set his rifle against the wall, reached in the greatcoat’s pockets, and withdrew handfuls of chipped shards similar to the lacquer grasping the door. “Coat’s full of the stuff. Wonder what it is?”

Benson unsheathed his knife and chipped one of the bullet casings free from the flecked crystal atop the floorboards. He plucked it up, turning it between his fingers, held it to Liphart, who took it in his own. Liphart’s breath stilled as he examined the freed shell, and his eyes swept to the semi-shut door, to the bullet holes punctured through the wood and crystal there, and as dusk crept over those still-swaying wheat fields, he again remembered hunting with his pa in the Virginian woods, how they’d tracked the wounded doe for two miles. He hadn’t understood how his pa did it, though he assumed it was something he’d learned in the Great War.

“Let me see it,” his father said, but Liphart couldn’t take his eyes from the sorry, bleating doe. Its black eyes gazed up at him. Breath wheezed through its blood-laden nostrils. It kicked out now and then, hooves longing for purchase.

His pa lifted the back of his hand, and Liphart jerked, raised his hands in defense. “Here, Pa. It’s here!” he said, his hands shaking, the loosed bullet casing in his ungloved fingers. He glanced at the wheezing doe, the blood running from the wound in its torso. His pa lowered his hand, met Liphart’s eyes, and extended the rifle to him.

“Clean up your mess,” he said, and when Liphart remained still, in shock at the doe which had started screaming, his pa forced the rifle into his numbed hands. Liphart stood there, vision blurred from tears, snot stuck to his nose and lips in the crisp autumn air, unable to pull the trigger, despite the animal’s pleas. His pa huffed, took a swig from his flask, and walked off the way they’d come.

Liphart held the rifle until his arms burned, gave way from strain, and after pissing himself above the bellowing creature, turned in pursuit of his pa, who he could just make out through the coagulated pines. The doe moaned as he left it there in the mud. Those wheezed breaths stuck with Liphart, tailed him through his dreams—even those of Marianne and Winnie.

He was a long way from his pa and those woods now. He’d grown and traded a hunting rifle for an M1 Garand; his oversized wool cap for a United States Army helmet.

Staring out over the rustling wheat, Liphart thought of Marianne. The way Winnie had cradled her that first week. The way Marianne had gripped his wife’s hand, the two of them in matching blue dresses, somber expressions, as he boarded the bus for war. He’d missed her birth, and now, fighting this insidious evil overseas, he was missing her life.

Benson rose from the floor, flicking the casing to the uneven boards there. “What are your orders?”

“S’cuse me?” Liphart said, Morner straightening in his periphery.

“Your stripe. The color,” Benson said, pointing to Liphart’s sleeve, the patch sewn there.

“Hold on, boys,” Liphart said, heart slamming in his chest. “I’m a private, same as you.”

“Private First-Class, sir,” Morner said, stance reminiscent of boot camp those months ago.

Fuck, Liphart thought, and guilt rose in him like smoldering embers. Forgive me, Lord. He crossed himself, catching Benson’s straightening smirk.

“Orders, sir?” Morner asked again. As if PFC was any sort of leadership role. Liphart cursed the discretion of his commanding officer. How he’d seen fit to promote him before they’d flown to England.

“Let’s hunker down for the night,” Liphart said, looking to them in turn. “Any of you have a map? I lost mine in the jump.”

“Sir,” Benson said, shrugging his pack from his shoulders.

“What should I do, sir?” Morner asked.

Liphart moved to the door, shut it, and looked Morner toe to head. “Shed some weight.”

“Sir?”

Liphart sighed, resigned to his new role, examining the iridescent shard between his fingers. “Souvenirs are one thing, but walk around wearing that and you’re twice as liable to get shot.”

* * *

Night fell in a wash over the French countryside. Liphart stood at the table overlooking a map of Normandy. “Either of you see any signs when you touched down?”

Benson shook his head. “Trees and fields ’til I found you.”

Liphart’s eyes met Morner, who rested his rifle near one of the windows. Shook his head as well.

“I think when the C-47s hit that German artillery they panicked, and with all the fog, who knows where they ended up dropping us.”

Benson nodded. “All I know is the jump near tore my arms off, ripped my pack and chute right up from under me.”

“We were going too fast,” Liphart said. “I figure the company’s scattered all over Normandy.”

“So,” Morner said. “We’re lost?”

Liphart sighed. “Come morning, we’ll follow the road a ’ways, meet up with those we can find.” He wasn’t sure if he’d said it to comfort himself or Morner, but it looked to do the opposite as the boy slid down the wall onto his bedroll.

I’m not trained for this, Liphart thought, settling himself in the corner near the window. “One awake, two asleep. Three-hour shifts. I’ll take first.”

* * *

A moonlit haze shone through the window where Liphart sat in the house’s corner, the wheat field’s brushing static just beyond the thin-glassed pane. From what he could tell in the blue night’s shroud, Benson and Morner were awake as well. So much for two asleep, he thought, watching the other men sitting upright against their respective walls. But how could anyone sleep here? Utterly surrounded in a hostile land.

His thoughts drifted to his modest house in Virginia. How the wide-open hills and trees flew to the horizon, how the sunset nestled into those pines each night. How they’d watch most every one, as a family. The church he, Winnie, and Marianne attended each Sunday before his departure. “Daddy,” Marianne said, dark hair done up in bows, Bible in her small hands as the service let out, “can we get an ice-cream?” He bent down, caught Winnie’s tears as she wiped them away, biting her lip. “Marianne,” he said, eyes level with his daughter. “I just couldn’t bear to tell you sooner, love. Your mother was right, I should’ve. I know I should’ve…” Liphart remembered her tears, how she’d dropped the Bible right in that church parking lot. Not advancing, not recoiling, just—still. Winnie gripped Marianne’s shoulders from behind, and Liphart’s eyes grew heavy with tears.

“What do you mean?” Marianne asked, one hand gripping her dress, one hiding her mouth in the way she did when she was scared or uncomfortable. “You’re leaving?”

He sighed, met her eyes. “Going there will bring me closer to you, love. I know you don’t understand, but by going now, I may avoid being told to go later.” He was doing it again, what Winnie often accused him of: treating their five-year-old like an adult. She looked up to her mother, who gripped her shoulders, and as she wailed in his arms, he thought of his pa leaving him there in the woods with that doe, and despite vowing to raise her better than his old man had raised him, his pa’s words echoed in his mind: “We carry our mistakes, boy.”

Liphart closed his eyes, crossed himself. “And it is He who carries us.”

The mattress’s springs whined. Liphart opened his eyes to Benson sitting upright in the bed. “You got God, Liphart?” Benson asked, following it up with a quick, “Sir?”

“That I do, and He has me.”

Benson chuckled. “You know, I’ve looked all over, but I haven’t seen any God.”

“You know,” Liphart said, adjusting himself in the chair they’d pulled to the corner. “I’ve looked all over and can’t find where I asked your opinion.”

Benson smirked, lifting his hands in surrender.

“God’s all around us,” Liphart said, staring through the glass of the window there, those fields bathed in blue. “He saw us through that jump, didn’t He? I’m here. We’re here. So I’ll keep praying, for me, you, all of us.”

Benson sighed, shoulders drooping. “Would’ve been a mercy to let us die in the sky. Spare us all this.”

All this, Liphart thought. We’ve only been here one day…and he remembered the night prior. Struggling to clip his hook to the wire above the column of terrified soldiers filing out of the C-47. Exploding German antiaircraft guns booming from below. How he’d watched a nearby plane absorb a yellow-streaked shell, engulfing in flame as the engine vomited smoke. He remembered the way it screamed as it fell to France, the banshee wailing of that iron-clad behemoth cast from heaven. The lush fog lit by open-mouthed artillery, hell itself rife with lapping tongues of death. The roars of unseen devils projecting molten-leaden screams.

“It’s harder,” Benson said, “not believing. Knowing this is it.” He leaned against the wall. “I wish I could. Believe in God, someone looking out for us. I just can’t.”

Liphart opened his mouth, inhaled, but Benson continued. “But hell…? I believe in hell, all right. Remember how they taught us to land from a jump? How during drills Captain would say, ‘You just broke your legs, Private,’ when someone touched down wrong? When I was about to land, I saw a soldier below me hit the earth dead wrong, heard the bones snap despite all the noise above me. I touched down, shed my chute, and ignored his screaming, the way his legs bent out at the knees. He begged for help, looked me right in the eye as I walked past…I didn’t even look back, just left him there. Figured his screams would draw Germans, get me killed…”

Liphart stilled with Benson’s words, felt the cool of those Virginian woods in his hands, his lungs and throat.

Benson continued, “I just…I left him there. See, sir, my hell is here, with me now, and more than like, here on out. We live in hells of our own design. When we die, that’s the end of it. A sweet relief…but life is waking hell.”

We carry our mistakes, Liphart thought, glad to have God then. Knowing He would see him home, to his girls, if only he’d be a vessel for His purpose.

“Your girl, or something?” Benson asked, pointing to Morner and the photo he held. A sorry attempt in hiding his tears.

“My sister, Millie,” Morner replied, stuck to the photograph. “She died when we were small.”

Benson sighed, massaging the back of his head. “Look, kid, I could be wrong…Maybe we go somewhere after. What do I know? I’m just some guy.”

Morner nodded, tucked the picture away, and stretched out on his bedroll.

Liphart sat looking through the window, thinking on Benson’s words. Wasn’t he some guy too? Didn’t he have the propensity to be just as wrong? When had God spoken to him in the way He did Abraham or Noah?

No, he thought, and his eyes grew heavy with the rustled song of insects in the field beyond the road.

* * *

Liphart held his breath and eased the window open another inch, allowing his rifle an unobscured view of the child at the wheat’s edge. He brought an eye to his sights, saw her head—just below the surface of the brushing field, a tattered, soiled dress, feet bare in the blue glow of the moon. Liphart glanced over his shoulder, whispered, “Benson, Benson.” No response. The air danced and mauve soot floated within the space. Liphart inhaled, and the metallic tang on the air crawled down his throat into his lungs. Burning tears formed in the corners of his eyes. Has the air always been this thick? He turned to the window again, stood, and made for the door. Rifle in hand. His throat a dried husk. Be with me, Lord.

Having walked the cratered soil and overstepped the wire fence, his boots met the road.

Displaced by Germans? he thought. Used to live here, perhaps?

He stood there, watching her yank a rope, its end lost in the sea of wheat. She faced away from him, tugging with both hands, grunting. Breath held, Liphart made it to the road, his boots crunching the loose dirt and gravel.

“Hey, there,” Liphart said, hand raised. She whipped around, still holding the rope. Liphart near buckled at the knees. Beneath the cropped brunette hair lay the green eyes of his daughter. Marianne? he thought, and though he blinked the impossibility away, her name clung to the edge of his tongue.

The girl stared into him, and a breeze lifted the bangs from her face, blew the tattered dress atop those bare feet in the dirt. Her fingers twitched around the rope. Liphart withdrew the chocolate bar they’d been issued before the jump from his breast pocket.

“Here,” he said, holding it out to her. She tilted her head and drew a series of arcs in the dirt with her toe. Liphart laid his rifle down, tore the wrapper from the bar, bit into it, rubbed his stomach. “Good, see?”

She paused her drawing, inching near until she stood within arm’s reach. The rope grew taut in her hand, its end still swallowed in the field behind.

“Daddy, can we get an ice-cream?”

The girl snatched the bar from him, and Liphart couldn’t help but smile. She nibbled at its edge, staring up at him with those familiar eyes.

“There you go,” Liphart said as he rose to his feet. “Eat up, hon.” God had placed him here for this, he was sure now.

She stared at him, face dirt-laden, and as her nose bled, an acidic tang permeated the air. High-pitched ringing exploded in Liphart’s ears and he fell to his knees, gritting his teeth against the knives in his skull. Blindly swiping for his rifle, squinting at the girl tugging her rope again, again, again—until something jutted from the field’s edge. Hands….head…arms…swarmed with flies. Not just a corpse, a miasma of rot.

The ringing heightened and Liphart clenched his eyes as warmth ran from his ears. Marianne flashed through his mind.

A test, he thought. From God.

He opened his eyes to an undulating corridor, a dark hall littered with suspended purple debris, breath quickening as he lifted his rifle. He swallowed, and the floating purple flecks gave way as he ventured farther. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he thought, wrapping the rifle’s strap taut around his forearm. The floorboards creaked, and Liphart paused, straightened. Pained, wheezing breaths rose in a swarming echo. God, be with your servant, he prayed, heart pounding with the narrowing walls, constricting with each step. He peered into the darkness, and a bellowing snort enveloped the corridor with unholy sound, reverberating in his chest as he ran, stumbling, through the violet-hued dark.

The void throbbed around Liphart as the landscape transfigured. Explosions snarled through the open hatchway ahead of him and the other paratroopers in the column. The C-47 made small on the hell hurled from below. The trooper at the open hatch tapped his helmet, pointing to the wire above them, and the men hooked themselves up as instructed. The plane jerked from a nearby explosion. Liphart trembled in the barrage, and the reverberation of the shells traveled up through his boots. He swiped his hook at the wire but couldn’t attach. It evaded him again as the plane banked hard, slamming him against the leftmost wall. The trooper near the opening knocked his helmet and screamed something Liphart missed under the chorus of death beyond the plane’s hull, repeatedly thrusting his hand to the flashing sky.

Liphart’s heart thrummed in his ears. He couldn’t hold up the column. Men could die because of him. One by one, troopers leaped from the plane. The C-47 rocked, engines roaring as Liphart inched toward hell’s open maw, still unable to latch to the wire.

Swipe, miss.

Swipe, miss.

“I can’t get it,” he said, voice drowned in the maelstrom. “I can’t latch!” He tried to turn, but hands grasped his arms, legs, pack, hefting him up, pushing him forward, his boots kicking for purchase. He screamed, thrashing as the line of soldiers dwindled ahead of him.

Three…

two…

one.

“I can’t latch!” Liphart said, crying to the one slapping his helmet with a smile. The jumper in front of Liphart glanced back and the man at the opening drew his pistol, placed the barrel to the trooper’s head. The pistol flashed, and the soldier fell through the opening. Liphart pissed himself as his father smiled, his eyes glistening black orbs, wearing the Great War uniform worn in those photos strewn through Liphart’s childhood home. His pa’s toothless smile oozed tar, his mouth widening for the onslaught outside. He beckoned Liphart forward with the pistol.

Liphart tried to latch once more and—free of the unseen hands now—collapsed. Searing breath on his neck stilled him, and he saw the blood spray over his shoulders in his peripheral vision. He could place those pained groans anywhere. “We carry our mistakes, boy,” his pa said, and with a second flash, Liphart fell from the plane screaming, somersaulting again, again, again, groping for his reserve chute through the night rife with hellfire. The ground raced to meet him and he closed his eyes, cheeks rippling with the speed of his descent.

Winnie stood at the sink in the violet lowlight of their kitchen, hammer and chisel in hand. God brought me home, Liphart thought as the space reaffirmed itself. Temples throbbing, he slung the rifle to his back. He inhaled her perfume—roses and cream. A metallic bitterness on his tongue. Those brown curls bouncing with the tink, tink, tink, of hammering chisel through the layered crystal atop the counter, stretching up the wall. The lilac sun shining through their lone kitchen window. On its sill, a lighter, pencil, and photograph of Liphart stepping off the bus in his uniform, bag in hand.

Liphart smiled. “Win, baby, I’m home.”

She lifted her head, inhaled the soot floating amid the poorly ventilated room, and peered into him with blackening eyes. Her mouth a long, open O. She worked at a translucent bulge of mineral grown over the sink’s nozzle, a pile of chiseled shards atop a nearby cutting board. She hammered again, again, again, and the piece broke free, fell to the counter with a thump. She stared at the chunk, mouth wide though speechless, and as Liphart rounded the table, he noted her bloody hands. “Win,” he said. “Baby, your hurt—”

Winnie turned from him and her jaw fell lower, swung suspended as she croaked into the hallway. The wooden squeal of a chair.

Marianne sat herself at the table, and as Winnie lifted the board of shards from the counter, Liphart stepped toward their daughter. Winnie thrust the chisel in her offhand toward him and he stepped back, narrowly avoiding it—crashed hard to the floor. Her eyes never left his as she poured the crystalized debris onto the plate their daughter held, the eyes and mouths of his girls shimmering voids. Marianne looked down at Liphart from her spot at the table, her plate dripping red, and said in his own voice, “Eat up, hon.”

The sensation of falling. His stomach’s ascent barred by the stone lodged in his throat. He fell forward, and the wheat’s hushed song returned. He placed his hand on the trembling farmhouse door, reverberating on its hinges.

Morner stood above Benson in the purple knee-high powder, bayonet fixed to his rifle. Benson shivered with each of the boy’s thrusts. Liphart slid his rifle from his shoulder, trained it on the kid thrusting away.

Morner yanked the blade from Benson and straightened, hands red with blood, his lips a frozen smile as he turned, facing Liphart. “You were right,” he said, unblinking. “Millie came back…with us now…said to kill—”

Liphart’s arms shook with the rifle’s recoil. The round punched a hole in Morner’s chest, flinging him into the bedframe. Liphart shook, breath stilted, rifle heavy in his numb hands. He saw tall Virginian grass. The stench of his pa’s cheap whiskey permeated the room. Morner hunched there, half-sitting at the foot of the bed. “I can’t hear Millie…”

Liphart shot him again, and when the boy’s head lolled, Liphart dropped the rifle, fell to his knees.

Where are they, where are they? he thought, eyes brimming with tears, clawing through the churning violet for the loosed shells.

The windows rattled in their panes, and as the walls shook the dust from themselves, the dead slunk to the floor reanimated, fish torn from water. Liphart took up his rifle and turned to the doorway. The girl floated inches above the road in a tunnel of amaranthine light, the dust and dirt in miniature cyclones as a corpse flailed on the end of her rope, its limbs wild in heaven’s tunneling aura. She held him without effort, gazing into the fury of that brightening sky. The field thrashing in unison with itself, half-lit in mauve, half-lit in moon’s stare.

She rose—a foot, two, three—drawn toward something within the expanse. Liphart swung the rifle to his eye, mashed the trigger once, twice. Shards exploded like shattered mirrors from her torso, and as she descended, razors swam through Liphart’s hands, his arms wracked with electric agony. He winced, frozen with pain, and wept at her approach, her dress whipping in the manufactured wind. The powder flowed from the house and broke around Liphart in a current. Marianne looked into him, face expressionless as the swirling debris crystalized, repadding the wounds in her form. Her eyes and mouth ever-deepening voids. How he’d missed the eyes of his daughter. Marianne grew as she approached. Fish-belly skin stretched taut over her protruding facial bones.

God brought home…to me, Liphart thought, and he crawled toward her, despite the pain. This, the sounding of angels…tidings of great joy. God was answering him, speaking as in the days of Abraham and Noah. How foolish to forget He worked in mysterious ways. Liphart’s soul swelled with joy. He wept there and lifted his arms to Marianne, who towered over him and the house now, needing to be held like he was forgiven.

And there, in a sky rippling with the chorus of angels, he rose with his daughter. Her wriggling hair refracting heaven’s light. Her rippling mouth speaking in a tongue he didn’t understand, but felt that with time, he would. His vision blurred in the white heat, and the corpse fell from his daughter’s hand, writhing as it descended to the narrowing road. And as Marianne fastened the rope around Liphart’s throat, he heard the angels declare with almighty authority: Do not be afraid.

End.

Scott J. Moses is the author of Non-Practicing Cultist (Demain Publishing). A member of the Horror Writers Association, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmic Horror Monthly, The NoSleep Podcast, Planet Scumm, and elsewhere. He also edited What One Wouldn’t Do: An Anthology on the Lengths One Might Go To. His debut novella, Our Own Unique Affliction, is slated for release in early 2023 via DarkLit Press. He is Japanese American and lives in Maryland. You can find him on Twitter @scottj_moses or at www.scottjmoses.com.

Colder Than the Heart Devoid of Love

By Matt Neil Hill

I tell the dead beneath the eternal snow: my family are never to leave the cabin.

Never.

In this new Ice Age, whenever I make my pilgrimage to the fishing hole, Elizabeth, Candice and Chloë stay behind. I feel the phantoms of their complaints in my chattering, ground-down teeth, but surely after all this time they must know I confine them for their own good? That as husband, father, and family physician I have only their best interests at heart? Through twitched curtains and peek-a-boo fingers they have seen the creatures that roam the snowfields at night, the strange and obscene omens of the day. No: the burden—the sacrifice—of traversing this bitter, devoured world is mine alone.

I see no living natural thing in the mile I walk to the frozen lake beneath the electromagnetic peristalsis of the sky. Ouroboros loops of emerald and violet light guide my way, where once it was the sun. Time was there would have been deer here, rabbits, no end of birds. People. The beasts of the earth and air have been culled, almost to the last. The rifle slung across my shoulder and the heathen talisman around my neck are of equal comfort to me now. The bullets protect against the rare living; the twists of wire, glass and ageless stone against the unholy. I did not make this fetish. I don’t know how the chimeric cephalopod it depicts sedates the creatures of the woods, only that it does. The crazed scholar who carried it with him is dead, and gave me little opportunity to enquire about its history. His body lies buried somewhere along this wretched track, the grave unmarked.

Elizabeth still wears a small gold crucifix against the hollow of her throat. I wear its twin, though only one of us still has faith in its power. Back home she will be trying to coax the girls through their lessons, her voice made brittle by the strain of what she confesses—to me alone, of course—she regards increasingly as a futile exercise. But the girls must learn their times tables and needlework, absorb the parables, poetry and geometry of history. Six sixes are thirty-six. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. For the sake of my sanity, I have to believe there may one day, somehow, be a need for those things again. If there is not, then we may as well surrender ourselves back to the dirt, still down there somewhere beneath the frost.

Out here, the steady crunch of my boots sinking through fresh snow drowns out the endless, nagging whine of the air. A combination of hunger and exertion slicks the furs and oilskins I wear with perspiration. Ice crystals form in my greying beard no matter how many times I brush them away with my remaining hand. The rhythm of my lungs and heart and feet drives me on.

I can see the hut out on the ice long before I get there, its red paint faded by the elements to a mournful pink. On those rare and foolhardy occasions when I’ve lingered till the birth of sunset matched the bloody bioluminescence of the frozen lake waters, the shack’s blackened windows appeared to float in air. I requisitioned it from one of the abandoned holiday cabins along the shore, dragged it out to the lake’s centre over the course of days. Candice and Chloë have often asked me why we can’t move to a home closer to the lake, so that they might skate as they used to. I tell them it’s because of the monsters that live here. Monsters far worse than those that disgorge their twisted bodies from the woods near our home when the night falls.

I walk out across ice that hasn’t thawed in two years. In the old world you could take a boat out on this stretch easily seven or eight months out of twelve. The hut is small, the interior cramped with rods, reels, tackle and tarps. There’s a dismantled, heavy duty auger with an empty fuel tank, and a sturdy net attached to a makeshift pulley system screwed into the roof. The hole in the ice is three feet in diameter. The cold that leaks up from its black maw brittles my teeth and tugs at the contents of my bladder. The savage chill outside is almost a balm by comparison.

I light a paraffin lamp and turn it down low. In our cabin by the woods my wife will burn just enough logs from the carefully harvested supply from the forest’s edge to keep our daughters warm while they wait for me to bring them food. Her arms are thick and sinewy from chopping logs in the woodshed—I would do it, but Elizabeth insists. She says she needs to do it. I understand the urge to feel useful, and to dissipate rage and despair, watching one’s body alter as a result of one’s labours.

The children are safe in our home, for the most part.

We keep a revolver in the bureau in the study. Elizabeth detests even the sight of it and its uncaring alien texture, yet events have convinced her of its necessity. Not six months ago I returned from the lake scarcely in time to save my family’s lives—though not my wife’s once-pristine beauty—from a roaming trio of desperate survivors seeking to invade our sanctuary. Elizabeth is shy of mirrors these days and wary of my touch, although the girls treat her just the same as they always did. The new world has taken a lot from us, and she will not allow it to take more. Those three bodies mark the farthest reaches of our property as a warning, their frozen corpses more or less intact.

We are not cannibals.

The lake’s exhalations carry the stench of ancient rot and bittersweet toxins. Of the excreted waste of creatures smaller than the head of a pin burrowed between the scales of leviathans that could swallow me whole and never know. Tectonic plates of flesh and bone and twinkling black skin feasted on by translucent invertebrate specks the colour of the tortured heavens. They sleep anew, these behemoths. At least for now. The ice beneath me trembles rhythmically in time with their dreaming snores, the glacial thudding of their hearts. Every size and shape of monstrosity in between glides there with them; maintaining, protecting. It is on these that I and my family feed.

I thread a bright hi-tensile line with lures that will glow in the stygian dark. A brace of male ribs and tibia, along with a woman’s jawbone, each sprayed with phosphorescent paint to attract the eternally ravenous things that dwell beneath. I concentrate on the thought of my wife and daughters and how hungry they always are as they shiver beneath frayed blankets, rather than on where those bones came from. Their previous owners no longer had a use for them, and the glittering ruby sites of their removal were part of the warning meant for any others who might have been planning to attack us. I no longer believe that anyone is coming to judge me for those justifiable murders however, and in truth I leave the frozen cadavers hanging from our fences as a reminder to myself.

I pull a fist-sized chunk of offal from a bucket crusted black with gore that sits in the corner and force its half-thawed mass onto the hook. My family will not waste away through a lack of effort or pain on my part.

The hole swallows the line as I reel it out. I sit on my stool and wait, trying not to focus on the feeling ebbing away from my mouth and nose, my gloved fingers, the self-sutured stump of my left wrist. I dare not stamp my feet to get the blood to flow, for fear that it might flow too much. I know the cost of calling the larger beasts to wakefulness and it is better to preserve my right hand than the odd toe. There was a time before the world went away when my father and I sat on the winter lake and pistoned our feet like jackhammers, beating out a tattoo to keep us warm, perfectly assured of our right to exist. He told me once that there was no cold greater than a heart devoid of love, and that we, as humans, could endure anything but that.

But that was so very long ago. The wind changes direction outside and whistles a different tune through the gaps in the planks, its song a lament piped from the open tracheotomy wound of a dying man.

I lean over the hole and shine a flashlight into the depths, just for a second. Little but depthless black water and the receding constellations of the lures shining back at me. Microbes and monsters drifting out of sight through nothingness, flourishing in this new phase of evolution, humanity’s extinction event seemingly almost played out. I don’t pretend to know where these creatures came from to fill the waters, nor their twisted brethren in the woods—the scholar from whom I removed the talisman raved about alternate dimensions, of hells beyond the Christian one, even as he died—but they brought at their vanguard this new and terrible winter that they might thrive.

I can still remember the interminable jokes at work about global warming and hell freezing over, before everybody stopped laughing.

And then just stopped.

I think of my daughters growing up in a world turned hollow, of endless white, of the forest one day inevitably no longer there for them to warm themselves because we have burned it down to the last stump in the name of survival. They have asked to leave the cabin many times, to try heading south in search of the civilisation they believe may still exist. I tell them that they are too small, too young, and too weak; that they would never survive the journey. This is true, but not really the reason. We have survived because we have stayed where we are—beyond the lake or the forest there is every chance we may not. In a few years, I say, when you are bigger. Older. Stronger.

I chew my lips to ascertain whether or not the cold has numbed me beyond feeling. It has not. Not yet.

At night I dream that the girls are becoming what they eat. The tendrils of their soft black hair grown sticky to the touch like fronds of weed, the soft pout of their lips ridged with scales and the pink murmuration of their tongues edged with suckers. When the dreams wake me—as they always do, my breath like the tar of prehistory congealed in my chest—I must clap a hand across my gaping mouth as it prepares to wail, so as not to awaken my wife. Her back seems to grow leaner each night, the ridges of her vertebrae increasingly to my eyes, in those hypnagogic hours before dawn, like a row of tightly closed squid beaks beneath the skin. I dare not touch her to confirm my impressions, lest she expel the screams that I myself have stifled.

I have begun to check my own extremities for mutation more often than I know to be healthy. Even if the hospital where I used to work had not been burned almost to the ground, it is fifty miles away on roads lost beneath chest-high drifts of snow. In any case, the equipment left inside its dripping, soot-smeared skeleton would almost certainly be too damaged to be of use. Whatever cellular changes may have been wrought upon us by our new diet will reveal themselves at their own pace. There is nothing else left to eat but bark or snow, so what choice do we have?

Something tugs at the line and I touch the talisman at my throat, even though its effect is much reduced on the water dwellers, and begin to haul in the catch. One handed, the work is slow. The wind surges and the lamp’s flame flickers almost to extinction before coming back stronger, painting everything an oily and jaundiced gold. There is resistance and I brace myself. My muscles dream of tiring but it’s a luxury I cannot grant them. I bite the scarred ridges inside my cheek to stop myself from yelling out as I birth this struggling creature from its amniotic pool. Its flesh tears against the jagged rim of the hole. Compressed body unfolding, it resembles nothing so much as an octopus disgorging a bloated human baby, if that infant’s head had been flattened in a vice and its tongue extruded with pliers.

I have seen worse.

My hook pierces this abomination’s jaw. Its skin cycles through all the colours of murder, baby eyes like black stones behind nictitating membranes. It spasms on the ice after I sling it away from me into the net, still tethered to the bright orange umbilicus of the line. I winch it into the air as quickly as I’m able, not wanting the frenzied thrash of its tentacles beating against the ice. Before I can secure the ropes I fumble against its gyrations and one of its limbs snaps out across the air between us, knocking me off my feet. The net falls and the monstrous thing starts trying to drag itself back towards the hole, a high-pitched and sulphurous mewling spilling from its impaled mouth. I try to pull on the ropes again but the suckers on its forelimbs have already gained purchase on the ice.

I let go and jump across the hole to where the auger blades stand. I snatch one up and turn back to the beast. Even though I know its appearance is but a cruel mockery of my species I cannot bear to impale that deformed child’s face, and so I plunge the spiral blade into the spot where I imagine its heart to be. Its squeals cut through me as it tries to grip the spear. I kick at its flailing appendages and stab it twice more before it stills, finally finding its most vital organ, its many arms settling like wilting leaves as it surrenders to the inevitability of death.

I fall back on the ice, barely feeling the impact, too concerned about what else might be raised by the cacophony of our battle. I wait for the thundering of my own blood in my ears to be replaced with the screech of rending ice as impossible teeth come to grind me to paste. I rub at the fetish, an alien kind of prayer. Minutes pass. On the sagging bulb of the creature’s body, fluid the colour of a winter moon wells up around the gashes. Its malignant expression doesn’t change. We stare at each other, our bodies inflating and deflating in sync, although each towards a different end.

I cannot place this atrocity whole upon my family’s table, and will need to sever the anthropoid head. The girls have no idea the creatures they eat are even more damned and deformed than those that roam the woods, though I fear that Elizabeth may have begun to suspect. I have butchered scores of these creatures—hundreds—excising their almost human faces, their vestigial limbs and genitals, leaving only what resembles the fish, crustaceans or arthropods my wife and children would recognise. Though to eat of the bodies of these creatures may be akin to sacrilege, we have not yet been struck down.

My darling girls must eat, but they need not be confronted with such uncomfortable truths as the real nature of their sustenance. Although these days, to be honest, almost all truths are uncomfortable. One of these is that although I love them with all the fierce bitterness of the last of a species, the days when I wake from dreams where all of us are dead are the happiest I have known.

Unable to resist the temptation, I shine my flashlight back into the hole. An eye stares back at me immediately, pale and baleful. Twenty feet down or two hundred: I have no sense of scale, and yet I feel an overwhelming sense of its enormity. It stares through me as if I do not exist, but I reintroduce it hurriedly to darkness nonetheless. Not an eye to be fooled by the trinkets of stripped and glowing bones. I pray that we are never so desperate for food that I am forced to widen the hole in the ice in an attempt to lure larger prey. I would do all I could, but in reality my family would be foraging for themselves from that day on. To my shame, I have been too cowardly and superstitious to prepare them for my death.

The sack is heavy on my back, the final struggles of its contents mere echoes down my frigid spine.

The walk back home is long, my muscles leeched of all their vigour. These days I feel it’s only the glowing love in the bilges of my heart that keeps me going, far more so than this tainted, otherworldly meat. Such love is complicated. Once upon a time I might have—perhaps should have—softly injected my wife and children with an overdose of morphine in their sleep, but these days I am too mortally afraid of being starved of human company to show them such mercy. I cannot know how long we will endure, but the life at the bottom of the lake—the teeming, archaic bestiary of an adjacent universe—was and is both our greatest threat and lasting salvation. Feeding our bodies and devouring our timorous minds all at once.

I am almost upon the cabin before I realise there is no smoke coming from the chimney.

As I draw closer I can see sigils like those on the talisman where I have carved them into the wood and stone, though I cannot decipher them. I needed to know only that they work, not how. I stand before the iced-up door listening to the cracking of branches in those uncomfortably close woods for some unearthly span of time before I step across the threshold.

The grate offers little but embers, and the coiled, subtly misshapen forms of Candice and Chloë covered by a blanket on the couch are motionless, and so terribly small. A new colour has leaked through the weave, a dark halo above where their heads might be, each tilted softly toward the other as if to provide comfort. One tiny, puckered palm pokes out from the cover’s frayed hem—I cannot tell whose. I take a shallow breath from the echoing air and hold it, the taste of gunpowder on my tongue as sharp as crematorium ash.

I step forward and the perspective of the room shifts. I see my wife on the floor behind the armchair, her legs at casually diverging angles and the pistol still gripped in her clawed fingers. Elizabeth’s feet are bare despite the cold, the greenish, scale-like protrusions of her toenails the only suicide note I can find.

The desperation, the anger—the callous rage—of this communication eviscerates me.

I think of my father’s words, of the good intentions behind his prophesy. It strikes me that I had been gazing into entirely the wrong heart. My chest is pricked with pins and needles, the crippling numbness of absolute zero. I try to exhale but cannot. I grasp at the talisman, but it’s a futile gesture: it protects only against the foe without. My knees buckle and I am prostrate on the floor, the dead weight of the lake beast across my back, dragging me down with the pointlessness of its slaughter. From this new angle I can see the bloody remains of my wife’s face, all of the scars she did not choose overwritten by the final one she made herself.

One that is so far beyond my ability to stitch or heal.

When I finally close my eyes—unable, at last, to bear witness to her ruination any longer—it is the glistening fauna of the lake I see, the endless drifting of fluorescent motes in darkness, tiny luminous human bones sinking with twinkling abandon through the silt of another universe’s leavings. The risible glow of my flashlight extinguished, along with every other light in the world. The plunging of my spear, three times in search of a means of death: I too sentimental to attack the illusion of a human child’s face.

And beyond everything that monstrous, impassive eye, too far away in every sense for me to be of any consequence.

Eyes open, the end of the indifferent and carnivorous world slouches towards me faster than before. The bodies scattered around me are cold, and in this house I am alone. In the darkness beyond the open door the denizens of the forest screech and giggle, calling for me to join them in the last language I will ever hear. I wrestle the lake creature from my back and stand. I tear the talisman from my neck and cast it aside. I pick up my rifle.

My final pilgrimage across the fields of snow is lit by the last bloody shimmer of misplaced stars, salt crystallising my eyes and lips, the joyful and demonic choir almost inaudible beneath the bleak hammering din of a heart still filled to bursting with the most unquenchable and futile kinds of love.

End.

Matt Neil Hill lives in the UK, where he was a psych nurse for many years. What he is now is largely open to interpretation, although he is definitely a husband and a dad. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various venues including Vastarien, Weirdpunk Books, Mysterium Tremendum, Weirdbook, and the Dark Peninsula Press anthologies Violent Vixens and Dark Highways. His non-fiction has featured in 3:AM Magazine and the 11:11 Press David Cronenberg anthology Children of the New Flesh. He is working, glacially, on at least one novel. You can find him on Twitter @mattneilhill

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